Planted 365. 

To the women from all over the world I'm privileged to know, and everybody who loves international women.

I have been saving up some articles for the occasion: here are two marvellous bios of trans lesbian elders.

Jan Morris. [Content note: the article is in the Guardian which takes a somewhat transphobic editorial stance, though this article is very positive towards trans women. However it does deadname Morris and includes a picture of her from back when she was presenting as male.]

Sandy Stone, a couple of years old from Vice but it came to my attention recently.

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Good things: jack and I went to see the Troy exhibition at the British Museum. With a bit of time and energy left after that, we also visited the Aztec room. And then we went out for pancakes at my favourite spot. And it was generally lovely.

Then we had a go at some tabletop roleplaying, with OSOs and their younger two. jack had put together a cut-down system, roughly D&D based but a lot lot lot less complex and fiddly. And a delightful little one-shot story about saving a baby giant turtle from a suspicious sea captain, set in an archipelago of islands on the back of giant turtles. jack really encouraged us to develop fun characters, and we're all excited to play more in this setting.

I have plans for an exciting date with ghoti_mhic_uait next week, and I think after that no more travel for fun. Honestly I'm not sure about this week either. Maybe it isn't morally or safety-wise sensible to visit a huge tourist spot in the capital. I'm expecting several months of somewhere between boring and terrifying, and I'm not really impatient for that to start.

ghoti_mhic_uait bought me and jack an annual membership of the British Museum for our birthdays. And it was a really good time to visit as members; the Troy exhibition, in its last weekend, was completely sold out for non-members, plus it was lovely to be able to go to the museum semi-spontaneously rather than having to plan for a particular time and buy tickets. I probably wouldn't have made a special trip or paid lots of money to see Troy, but when it was low pressure it was worthwhile.

Basically what they've done is presented objects that represent the myth as told in Classical literature, so lots of vases and friezes and so on, arranged to recount the story of the fall of Troy. And then they have a gallery of Renaissance responses to the Trojan myth, and then a gallery of modern (ish) responses. Nice curation, lots of ideas about how the myth was interpreted through the culture of the time. And a marvellous collection of objects, the BM has really a lot of good blackfigure vases and beautiful neo-Classical objects. There is also quite a lot of commentary about how war is actually bad rather than epic, and thoughtful stuff about attitudes to women, and it's 2020 so we're no longer doing the ridiculous 'no homo' thing about Achilles and Patroclus.

My favourites were this gorgeous little bowl with a really sweet picture of Eris:


And a stunning pre-Raphaelite portrait of Clytemnestra immediately post-murder, which I couldn't photograph due to the lighting, and can't find an image of online.

Then we went to have tea in the special members' room. The main advantage is that it's quieter than the main tea-room, as it isn't in a huge echoing hall. We reckoned we had enough time and energy left to look at one more thing, and Jack was excited to see the famous double-headed turquoise snake from the meso-American gallery. I fell slightly in love with this grumpy woman who shares the room with it:


On the way we wandered past a staircase with some cool mosaics, the Wellcome gallery with has a Moai that they're in the process of returning to the Rapa Nui peoples they stole it from, and the gallery of indigenous North American stuff, much of which is again, stolen. Also the Enlightenment room, which I'm interested to go back to with more time, partly because it contains more stuff that the British Museum actually has a right to than a lot of the galleries!

Dinner was pancakes and mango lambic beer at My Old Dutch in Holborn, which has been a tradition since I visited the BM with my friend MK and his then two-year-old.

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As of some time last night, I have novel respiratory symptoms. I'm basically fine but it feels safest to act as if I am infected.

My lungs hurt, and it's not the tightness I associate with mild asthma symptoms, or the tired muscle ache / burn I associate with a bad cough (whether asthma or viral). Not badly, but pretty much continuously. I'm coughing a bit but not severely, and I don't feel feverish. I have a slight headache and sore throat, but that could be just about anything including stress. I am somewhat distracted but I've been able to get on with useful work today.

I'm probably being over-cautious, but I feel like the balance of probabilities points towards suspected case. So this morning jack and I activated our self-isolation plan. We've divided up the house so that I "live" upstairs and he stays downstairs apart from using the bathroom. We have separate towels and we're cleaning metal bathroom surfaces constantly. jack has taken on food prep for both of us and he's leaving me plates of food and cups of tea and retreating to the bottom of the stairs.

And we're preparing to avoid leaving the house at all until it's more likely that we're not infectious than that we still are. We have plenty of supplies, and we managed to get an online supermarket delivery order in by virtue of going on the website just after midnight last night, which was fortuitous timing. It's going to suck, more so if my symptoms progress beyond the almost ignorable level, but since we can do this I think it's the right thing.

The most likely (and in some ways comforting) narrative I can come up with is that I picked this up when I had to attend a dental appointment two weeks ago. I had very mild symptoms (including a tell-tale sore throat) within a few days of that surgery, which in retrospect I can imagine might have been the first phase. And now, 12 days after the first symptoms, I have potential lower respiratory tract symptoms, so hopefully this is the second phase. That's comforting because it suggests my source of infection is a necessary medical appointment rather than either something frivolous I did, or just being unlucky even though I've stayed at home except for exercise for ten days now, and jack has been doing minimal necessary shopping with careful social distancing. And if I picked it up at the dentist it's unlikely I infected the dentist or any of his staff or patients. Also, if my guess is right I'm probably approaching the end of the infectious phase.

We are really not sure how long we should maintain full isolation at home. UK guidelines say 7 days from start of symptoms (me, today), or 14 days from contact with a symptomatic person (Jack). But I suspect this is not entirely adequate especially as it's much less restrictive than the WHO advice. If my symptoms don't get any worse than this and jack doesn't get sick at all, which is definitely the brnach of the timeline I'm hoping for, I won't know whether I've actually had Covid. Currently we're thinking that if nothing changes we'll start interacting with eachother again after 7 days, but not go outside until we're more confident the incubation period has passed; I think the safest is 14 days from the end of symptoms but we might not be able to sustain that.

Send hugs and support to jack, please? He's doing amazingly in a somewhat scary situation.

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I'm doing basically fine but continuing to be careful.

I still have the same single worrying symptom I had on Thursday, sore lungs. I don't otherwise feel ill, feverish, tired or anything else, so I'm really second guessing myself over whether isolation was the right choice.

The last few days have been mostly pleasant though stressful for jack who's handling everything on his own and worrying about me getting seriously ill or possibly infecting him.

Friday was 19 days since the government started taking action. I worked in my new upstairs den (previously jack's den.) We had a weird date where jack brought me up a tray with the Shabbat ritual things, I made kiddush sitting at the top of the stairs and he sat at the bottom, and we ate dinner in parallel but at a distance. And then we played Potion explosion over Steam, which worked pretty well.

The weekend was ridiculously lovely, and we were both good and only sunbathed and exercised in our own garden. Saturday, day 20, I went to virtual shul, which on only the second iteration starts to feel almost normal. Bigger than usual congregation, including some of the people who are usually strict about not using electronic technology on Shabbat. And in the afternoon I attended the second half of wildeabandon's Stardust readthrough which was generally satisfying and companionable. And I had a long phonecall with ghoti_mhic_uait.

Sunday, day 21, had slightly fewer online social commitments. We had a lot of time in the sunshine in the garden, remaining carefully distanced. cjwatson came by to wave to me from the street while I looked out of an upstairs window like some ridiculous fairy tale princess. We video chatted to jack's university friends; it's been a long time since the original trio got together since one of them lives in Croatia and has two small children. And I did my online chevruta just like the previous week, slightly sheepishly admitting I was Skyping from bed because I was isolating for basically no reason. And I had a long conversation with cjwatson in the evening.

Since today is day 22, and two weeks of lockdown, it's now been a whole two weeks since I last interacted directly with anyone other than jack. jack has also not left the house or allowed delivery people to come close to him since I got the weird symptoms on Thursday, so five days so far.

I now know eight people who have pretty clearly been through a bout of coronavirus, and 21 who like me are being careful because they have suspicious symptoms.

Thanks to everyone who made nice comments on my last post, I really appreciate all of you.

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Continued from Day Four. (From the beginning.) On Friday we packed all of our stuff back up and headed out.  We were barely out of the resort when: This tire is flat. Apparently all that gravel out to Horne Lake Caves the day before also included a small screw.  We limped around the corner to … Continue reading Summer Horrification — Day Five — Englishman River and Rathtrevor

It's leap day, which gives me an extra day in the short month to write this boring blog post! Alas, I spent most of the month traveling for work and vacation, and didn't finish my main-series project(s). Is the monthly shaming even motivational for me? Yes, of course, though I am skilled at filling my life up with whatever is currently catching my fancy.

For example, earlier this month I finally got working this fairly straightforward raspberry pi project, which I built to try to diagnose wtf is going on with my overcomplicated 4-zone hot water (hydronic) home heating system. It has a problem whereby my bedroom gets annoyingly hot under certain conditions, even though the thermostat is not being triggered. Just the "boiler room" looks like this:

Boiler Room

Of course I could pay someone money to tinker with it but the true satisfaction of problem solving is in suffering that problem for multiple years while you pick up the necessary skills and data to solve it yourself and work up the mental energy to apply the solution. In the above you can perhaps barely make out the diagnostic device hanging from the scary bundle of wires (not my fault) with some of its heat sensors zip-tied to pipes. The needlessly hand-built software can give me one of these:


System Diagram

(I was pretty happy with the cheap but fairly maintainable way I decided to do this, with a templated SVG file. Since they're text, I just left placeholders like [[alice]] (the name of temperature probe "A") and just string-replace it with the temperature string as I deliver the SVG over HTTP. Will use this trick again some day.) Here you can see Floor 2 source is hotter than the others even though its thermostat isn't even on. It also produces time-series graphs of course, which are decidedly more retro (but really is only visible at full size):


Click for full 1080p pixel glory

I have succeeded in catching it in the act and have some theories about what's happening (the heat appears to be convective but I don't yet understand why the boiler keeps putting out heat in this situation). But I haven't solved it yet, and certainly haven't fixed it.


SIGBOVIK 2020 is in about a month, and so the deadline is coming up imminently. Consider submitting if you have anything to share! I have a few ideas partly done but it looks like the writing will be coming at the last minute, of course.

Stay safe out there!

Started out as Friday but became a Monday and thus the weekend became confusing. I baked a flourless cake and wept over a Sunday dinner  that felt more like Tuesday’s leftovers, like the whole leftover menu from the whole week. Why do we bother naming the days anyway — it reminds us we once had […]

No doubt — this is a crazy, scary, sad, worrying time for everyone. Most of us are sheltering in place and trying our best to adjust to a new reality. While we are not performing heroic deeds like all the frontline healthcare workers and first responders, grocery store employees and delivery drivers, we can all … Continue reading nine cool things on a tuesday (stay home, save lives edition)

1. Happy birthday Sai Pallavi: 4 times the actress redefined female superstar tag  Onmanorama
2. Birthday Special! Sai Pallavi is the epitome of elegance and grace in sarees. PHOTOS  Times of India
3. Happy Birthday Sai Pallavi: 5 Instagram Pictures Of The Actress You Can’t Miss  News18
4. Happy birthday Sai Pallavi: A powerhouse performer  Deccan Herald
5. Sai Pallavi birthday: Rana Daggubati, Naga Chaitanya and others send wishes  The Indian Express
6. View Full coverage on Google News

More than a quarter-century ago, I was driving to Pittsburgh, with my wife, Marianne Porter, and we were talking about fantasy and about steam locomotives. I made a joke about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works and Marianne laughed. Then, another mile or so down the road, I said, "Write that down, please."

Thus was born the Iron Dragons Trilogy, a trio of stand-alone books, the third of which, The Iron Dragon's Mother, was published just last year.

Far more recently, just an hour or so ago, I got an email from my associates at Open Road Media, telling me that The Iron Dragon's Mother, first of the three, will be on sale for $1.99 this coming Monday, March 23.

That's one day only BUT this time the sale includes Canada. Which I am very grateful for because the Canadian science fiction community has always been very warm and kind to  me.

Anyway, here's the boilerplate below, cut-and-pasted from the corporate email:


We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99

Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.

Newsletter	Link
Early Bird Books	Subscribe Now
The Lineup	Subscribe Now
The Portalist	Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem	Subscribe Now
A Love So True	Subscribe Now
The Archive	Subscribe Now
The Reader	Subscribe Now

So if you (1) read e-books, (2) don't own a copy of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and (3) would like to... well, here's your opportunity to do it on the cheap.

Just a reminder that people in Canada and the US can buy an e-book of The Iron Dragon's Mother, the first book of my stand-alone fantasy trilogy for only $1.99 today. Tomorrow will be too late:

Here's the boilerplate:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99

Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.

Newsletter	Link
Early Bird Books	Subscribe Now
The Lineup	Subscribe Now
The Portalist	Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem	Subscribe Now
A Love So True	Subscribe Now
The Archive	Subscribe Now
The Reader	Subscribe Now

Open Road Media, my main e-book publisher, appears to be on a tear these days. Maybe because a lot of self-isolated people need books these days and aren't willing to wait for them to be delivered through the mails? I don't know and I haven't asked. I just pass along their promotions to you.

On Sunday, April 19th for one day only, my classic Grand Tour of the Solar System novel, Vacuum Flowers, will be on sale for $1.99 in Canada and the US.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark has a headful of stolen wetware, enemies that want her dead, and a Solar System full of colorful human and posthuman cultures that is far too small for her to hide in. She doesn't want to change everything. But she has no choice...

(Vacuum Flowers was written at the height of the Cyberpunk/Humanist wars and was meant to belong to neither camp. But I did throw in a short nod to each camp in the novel. Widely separated, of course.)

Here's their chart:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036504	Vacuum Flowers	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Portalist NL	US	2020-04-19	2020-04-19	$1.99
9781504036504	Vacuum Flowers	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Portalist NL	CA	2020-04-19	2020-04-19	$1.99

Immediately after, on Monday, April 20th, my short story collection, ,Tales of Old Earth, goes on sale in the US and Canada for $2.99.

Tales of Old Earth contains nineteen of my best and strangest stories, including two Hugo Award winners and I forget how many also-rans. Featuring a planet-sized grasshopper, the train to Hell, an amorous sphinx, the last elves in the world, a civilization inside an International Harvester refrigerator, and much, much more!

Here's the second chart:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036511	Tales of Old Earth	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-04-20	2020-04-20	$2.99
9781504036511	Tales of Old Earth	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-04-20	2020-04-20	$2.99

Enjoy!

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

Becky Lynch has become the Superstar with the most total days as Raw Women’s Champion, surpassing Alexa Bliss.

 This time I started earlier in the day while the little chap was watching TV,  rather than nod off, I thought I would activate and tackle those projects that have been waiting to be completed. The ECW regiments were long over due, time to get the Flock box out again.


 As I want these units to be nice and quick and not too taxing, I’m going for a few layers of flock to base them. Dark earth, light earth, 2mm static grass then a longer mix of 4/6mm static grass. Maybe some flower tufts thrown in here and there too. Nice and quick with no painting going on.

I am so nervous about Valentine’s Day.  I haven’t ever done this before until I visited Earth and my friend Skeeter told me about it.  Should I give Spec a Valentine that is special and tells him how cute I think he is or should I give all my friends a Valentine that is the […]

Introducing the world's least versatile camera. The slogan says it all: "we can't all be heroes."

Note: Written and illustrated months before, well, everything happened.

One of the people that I'm subscribed to on YouTube a while back did a tribute video to this song by My Darkest Days to the new Robin Hood movie starring Russell Crowe. I thought this song would be a perfect match to the Mad Max trilogy

What do you get when you mix The Road Warrior, Escape From New York, plus a handful of other related movies.......you get Doomsday. The cannibal scenes in this movie inspired me to do a fan tribute video to Gwar's Meat Sandwich

1. Queen Elizabeth's VE Day speech says veterans would be proud of coronavirus effort today  ABC News
2. Queen’s VE Day TV address: Tells Brits to ‘never give up’  NEWS.com.au
3. 'Streets filled with love': The Queen gets personal in VE Day broadcast  Sydney Morning Herald
4. King George VI VE Day speech: Read poignant message 'Our will-power is inexhaustible'  Express
5. A message of hope in difficult times  Telegraph.co.uk
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Coronavirus restrictions to lift in NSW from Friday, but will not be following all National Cabinet measures  ABC News
2. Berejiklian's roadmap to freedom in NSW  Sydney Morning Herald
3. Mother's Day state by state: What can and can't you do?  The Canberra Times
4. Permission to mingle: NSW will ease lockdown laws on Friday  Daily Telegraph
5. NSW to ease lockdown restrictions from Friday  The Age
6. View Full coverage on Google News

You can iron your embroidery. I do it all the time! But I hear from a lot of people who …

Josh Kelly suffered from epilepsy, a brain disorder that forced him to drop out of high school nine days before graduation. For nearly a decade, Kelly attended Idaho State University working toward a degree in geology, with his service dog, a black pit bull named Cletus, by his side. The pair would dutifully walk two miles both ways to catch the bus to campus.

Unfortunately, Kelly passed away in February just two classes shy of his degree. Nonetheless, ISU granted him a posthumous degree on May 10. In the young man's place, Kelly's tearful father, Terrell, walked across the stage with Cletus by his side and accepted the diploma.

Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend and, for a lot of us, it’s an event that won’t be like normal. The possibility of many Mother’s Day traditions, like a nice dinner at a restaurant, isn’t even possible in many areas, and social distancing closes the door on many ideas, whether it’s enforced in your area or not. So, what options are there for Mother’s Day that don’t involve just ordering a gift online somewhere and having it shipped to […]

The post 12 Inexpensive and Thoughtful Mother’s Day Gifts appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

It's also perfect for last-minute gifting. READ MORE...

Say goodbye to your uncomfortable wooden chair for good. READ MORE...

BRING YOUR KID TO WORK DAY "but Dad, I wanted to be a rebel!"

Donald Trump's kept it pretty low key on Twitter in recent days. That didn't stop him from penning a little St. Paddy's Day sentiment though. If only he'd spell checked before sending it off though. Then again, would we expect anything less than this from the guy with a wide-reaching, well-developed reputation already for spelling shit in his own language incorrectly?

Yeah, yeah, we know. Here are some Trump Memes to smooth it over.

Donald Trump Jr. tried to sweet talk Twitter, and NOBODY was having it. Does the guy just want to be mocked by the masses on a continually often basis at this point, or what? 

This illustrator, John Holcroft, is genius! check out his website for more.

 

Episode 235 brings you a new segment this week, we are calling it "Harry Potter Today", which focuses on fan contributions, creations, and the things that matter to a Harry Potter fan today. This week we talked about the fan parody of popular Ke$ha song "We R who we R".

 

Episode 235 — Harry Potter Today

Find the latest episode and explore PotterCast interviews, discussions and more at PotterCast.com

Visit the-leaky-cauldron.org for the latest and greatest from Harry Potter's Wizard World.

Today, May 4th, is International Firefighters’ Day. Each year on this day, firefighters are celebrated – and rightly so.   Most people have an image of firefighters clad in heavy coats, over-sized boots and sturdy helmets, rushing into

Social Care Worker (x2) - Crookston Care Home and Day Centre: Location: Tranent; Rate: £11.05 - £12... https://t.co/uK9f06XYCS #mjsjobs

Today, May 4th, is International Firefighters’ Day. Each year on this day, firefighters are celebrated – and rightly so.   Most people have an image of firefighters clad in heavy coats, over-sized boots and sturdy helmets, rushing into