Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
— Anonymous, "The Goose and the Common"
There was a moment this week when I started mulling, "Well, what has this week been about?" and it occurred to me that at that exact moment, I was stirring my coffee with a sterling silver spoon.
I have inherited a significant amount of sterling silver from my grandparents, and my mom has passed along some of hers to me early. Even before that, I have often delighted in fine things that gave my life a luxurious touch. When the girls were young, I occasionally would serve what we called formal dinners, where we practiced eating with elaborate place settings and talked about proper manners.
I've been experiencing a bit of a cash flow issue lately. Nothing serious; I don't mean that I can't pay my bills, but with some recent medical and car repair expenses, I have had to cut back on some things. I've stopped eating out for the time being, and sometimes I have to wait a few days, until after pay day, to pick up the next set of groceries.
Recently, I decided to pull out a set of small sterling silver espresso coffee spoons I inherited from my grandmother. I went out looking for a lovely crystalline receptacle to keep them in on my counter by my coffee pot, and I found one, touched with gilding at the rim, at a vintage store, for $5. I bought a bottle of lavender syrup, and I will sometimes put a small amount in my coffee.
My sister bought me some luxury hand soap for my birthday, and I have decided that I like it so much better than the soft soap I had been picking up at the grocery store.
When the belt has to be tightened, it helps to indulge in a few small luxuries.
Image description: Background: A luxuriously painted vaulted ceiling at Versailles. Bottom center: a miniature sterling silver spoon rests on a counter. Behind it: a coffee cup with a small glass jar with more miniature silver spoons. Right: a bottle of lavender coffee syrup. Behind the coffee cup: a bottle of luxury hand soap and a house plant.

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
WAY. TOO. MANY.
I did not like the ending of this film. However, to say that I'm currently obsessed with it might be an understatement, so obviously I'm in. I bought all the way in, otherwise I wouldn't be left like this--feeling betrayed. I'm not going to go into all of my feelings because all of them would have to be under the cut thanks to the fact that they're all releated to the ending, so MAJOR SPOILERS.
But, yeah, I've literally been doing that thing that I do, which is to google the crap out of things that were mentioned in the film, like saja (fascinating stuff there!) and Korean water demons (mul gwishin), etc.
For those of you who saw it, what did you think of KPop Demon Hunters?Roadkill limited to stains on the road and one patch fringed with gray fur, the right size and shape for a pancake squirrel.
White asters forming into snowdrifts by the roadside, small and mid-sized versions. A few of the mid-sized pale purple types. Also, lots and lots of blooming Japanese knotweed.
Got out on the bike, windy and temperature around 70 F. Up to the country club, over to the road through the bog, home again. Did not die. Ride takes me over 500 miles for the year. Whether I reach 600 remains to be seen.
15.35 miles, 1:27:09
The shooting happened not long after his talk began, his security rushed him to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead. The campus, Utah Valley University in Orem, went into lock-down and shelter in place. While one arrest was made on-site, that person was later released. The assassin is still at large at this time.
POTUS has ordered flags at the White House to half-mast and Mike Johnson a moment of silence in the House of Reps.
It is reported that the shooter was on the roof of a near-by building, about 200' away.
Tots and pears. It's hard for me to say that our political process should not devolve into violence when the party in power incites violence daily.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/live/charlie-kirk-shooting-live-updates-conservative-activist-shot-at-utah-valley-university-event-school-says-190606372.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-shooting-charlie-kirk-event-utah-rcna230437

Diversicon selfie with (left to right) me, Naomi Kritzer, and Scott Lohman
It's Wednesday, so I'm back on Dreamwidth. It is really starting to amuse me that I spend so much time intending to get over here to blog and then, inevitibly, it is somehow ALWAYS a Wednesday when I do. Seriously, I had been planning on doing a daily con report from Diversicon, but I somehow did not manage it. To be fair, we were "on" a lot at the con.
Okay, so--how did it go?
I will be honest. I was really uncertain that this convention had its ducks in a row. There were duck in the pond, clearly, but I wasn't sure, at first, that anything meaningful was going to happen with said ducks.
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Like much of what follows, everything turned out not only to be FINE but actually kind of great (??)

Image: Naomi reading. The library meeting room was smallish, but the event was decently well attended!
I am not in this picture because I took it, but I would say that despite the fact that I feel like the whole thing went off last minute, the event was very well attended. I ended up reading from my newest book, which I am kind of struggling with. So it was nice to have some audience reaction to it and to get a chance to gauge how it read out loud in a very specific way. For instance, I regularly read my stuff out loud for flow, but I rarely read it out loud to other people to guage involvement. The bonus of being neurotypical (besldes the obvious) is that I can feel attention leaving the story when I read it out loud in a room like this and, of course, when the audience ignites. So both this and my reading at Diversicon really shaped my sense of the novel. (So thank you to everyone who was there!)
I sort of thought that we'd lucked out with the Thursday night reading. I did not necessarily think that the luck would hold all weekend.
But it did.
I do not know what black magic Diversicon had going on, but despite the fact that behind the scenes the programming schedule seemed to be changing minute by minute right up until the doors opened, once things started, not only did they run smoothly, but the energy of the convention increased as the con went on.
Friday was the most chaotic for me because I had a lot going on at home. I didn't really see (or remember to ask or check) my Diversicon schedule, so I had to let Diversicon know that I couldn't make it to the convention until almost 4 pm. That turned out not to be true. Mason was done with his interview by 2 pm and I was able to be on my way to pick up Eleanor Arnason and off to the convention by 3 pm, which meant I made it into the con by 3:30 pm.
In another wierd bit of black magic, both Friday and Saturday, we arrived exactly at the same time as Eleanor's friend Ruth Burman. This was great for Eleanor because the one thing I couldn't provide was an EARLY ride home for her. Eleanor, who is even less of a night owl than I am, would have had to stay at the con until nearly midnight on Saturday if it wasn't for Ruth.
My first panel was about something I wasn't sure I knew anything about. "Queens of the Apocalypse." When I was waiting for Mason to finish his interview before I headed to the con, I had a chance to ponder this. I think the panel title had gotten a bit lost in translation because Naomi has been known recently as the queen of the cozy apocalypse thanks, in part to stories like "So Much Cooking" and "The Year Without Sunshine." Since I was listed as the only panelist, I decided that what I'd do was introduce the audience to the subgenre of "Soft Apocalypses" which is a Thing and hopefully start a conversation about what the appeal of such things are, etc., etc. LUCKILY, Naomi didn't have a panel scheduled opposite this one and so she joined me in the discussion. Given that I planned it out in the car on the way to the con, it went surprisingly well. As you can see in the selfie above, one of the fun things about the convention hotel (there weren't a whole lot of them, it being way out in Plymouth and laid out extremely strangely) is that the panel rooms all had whiteboards, which we just decided to use. So, I was able to write out all of my recommendations. People took photos of the whiteboard after the panel!
Then, I attempted to get dinner in the hotel, which was a complete disaster.
They had a "make your own" sandwhich which listed chicken as a substitute for hamburger, but I apparently made a mistake choosing that option. I just wanted a simple chicken sandwhich--chicken, American cheese, lettuce, and mayo. That's it. But, not only did my food never arrive until everyone was finished, when it did it had no cheese, lettuce that seemed to have salad dressing on it, and a dollop of salsa? Which was not great because thanks to GERDS I really can't eat raw onions anymore and I'm not a fan of tomatoes, I never have been. But, whatever, I was so starved at that point that I ate it. The only nice thing? The waiter could tell how irritated I was and comped my meal.
But, like that's the other weird thing about this hotel? NO LUNCH service.
Eleanor had gotten a ride home with Ruth at that point and so I hung around a little bit longer, but bailed early under the assumption that Saturday would be the late night.
---
Saturday got complicated by the fact that I was picking up Eleanor again and Saint Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided to close down eastbound highway 94. I got myself coffee, but I still managed to be kind of bolluxed up by the whole construction situation. I was fifteen mintues late to pick up Eleanor, who admitted that had Patrick not sat with her, she was considering bailing. But, the highway going west was open and, shockingly, traffic free, so despite my delay we managed to get to the hotel on time. And, as noted above, right on the heels of Ruth Burman.
My first panel on Saturday was "SF Writers and D&D," which Naomi and I had proposed for a couple of reasons. First, she and I have started playing D&D again and, secondly, one of the posthumous guests of honor, Andre Norton, wrote Quagg Keep after having been invited by Gary Gyagax to play in the Greyhawk world of D&D (citation). We started out kind of uncertain about how much we'd have to say, but about a half hour into the panel the caffeine hit my system and I went FULL CON MODE.
Some of you have seen this transformation.
That was good because it carried me though the rest of the day. I missed Naomi's reading in favor of hanging out in the hall with Greg Johnson and Martha Hood and someone else whose name I missed, who like a lot of men who are aging in fandom has gone with Wizardcore as his look. The three of us discussed the Seattle Worldcon Hugo Awards as all of us watched it, either in-person or streaming.
Then I had a reading, followed by a panel on podcasts & podcasting. I was the only panelist listed on that panel, but Naomi and Martha joined me and so we managed to have a lot of good recommendations.
At some point in here I ate lunch brought to me by our fabulous guest liason, Bast, and a bunch of us went out to dinner together in the classic convention style. Table for SEVEN at the Red Robin (which was made kind of fantastic by our drill sargent of a waitress!) In the middle of dinner I asked the question "What will post-capitalism really look like?" and a half dozen or so people in rotating shifts proceeded to spend much of the rest of the night as we wandered back to the hotel's lounge area attempting to unravel this question. This included
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Image: a visual break in the wall of text! A bumble bee on a purple flower.
------
Sunday.
The strangeest thing about Diversicon was the fact that the energy of this convention continued to rise throughout the weekend. Normally, there's a bit of a peak on Saturday night and Sunday feels like winding down. Not so Diversicon! We found out that one of the reasons for this is that Diversicon continued to gain memberships as the weekend wore on--they started with something like 38 and had nearly double that by the end. I know there are some of you out there thinking is 60-something really a lot? Diversicon is a small convention and this number was enough, in fact, to put the con into the black. There will be a Diversicon 33! Hooray!
Sunday started out strong, panel-wise, with "Keeping on Keeping on (Diversity in SF)" We can partly thank Elenaor Arnason, who was not able to come on Sunday, but who asked me this question as we were driving back and forth to the con. "Do we still need Diversicon? Is diversity baked into SFF now? Does it need its own convention?" This is a real question. I mean, I think the answer is an obvious "YES!" but it is notable that SFF, as a whole, has really made lifting up diverse voice a priority and it has, to many extents, worked. Obviously, there is always more work to do, but, especially with Gaylaxicon coming up, this was a question that was close to my heart.
The panel I should have prepared more for was "Hacking, Hackers & Heists," as it devolved (evolved?) into a discusion of artifical intelligence as it exists today -- LLMs. But, I think we mostly kept on topic, despite that.
I ate my lunch in the con suite and then caught the end of "End of the World Fiction and/or Hope Punk" which was pretty interesting, and then Naomi and I sat in to the Second Foundation/Rivendell Group Discussion of our work. Our final official panel was our Two-Person Book Club, which is something that Naomi and I do informally and we thought it would be fun to bring to an audience. Basically, we just trade hot takes on whatever it is we're currently reading. For poor Naomi, this often means listening to me talk about manga, but she's also been on a mainstream romance kick right now, so it seems like a fair trade. ;-)
Closing ceremonies was surprisingly high energy, like I noted, and I had hoped to hang around for the after con dinner, but my brain had, by that point, completely fried.
I had several absolutely lovely conversations with folks one-on-one and for a convention I was certain was going to be at best disorganized, Diversicon fully blew past my expectations and not only cleared the lowest bar but actually won the race (to over extend the metaphors and mix them up a bit.)
It was an unexpected pleasure all around.
Should finish filling the cracks in the driveway today, making way for seal-coat at some future time.
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In the town of Pornainen, they've built a 13 meter tall battery of "low-grade" sand that they warm-up to 450 degrees C - that 842 degrees F! - and it can hold that temperatures for weeks if not months, then they can use the hot air from it to heat the town's local heating network!
I think that's a pretty awesome use. They're using excess energy generated by renewable sources - free energy - to heat up the sand, then piping it around town. The former method to warm up the town was a woodchip furnace plant, clearly they're drastically cutting their CO2 footprint with this. And by using low-grade sand, their costs are pretty low.
But let's talk about sand for a minute. Businesses are literally dredging up ocean floors for sand to make more concrete. And you can't recover it from broken-up concrete when buildings are demolished. Now, to use sand to make a thermal battery I think is a worthwhile endeavor. I just wish they'd work out better ways to repurpose and recycle existing demolished concrete.
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/sand-battery-renewable-energy-finland-b2818348.html
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/06/027211/a-very-finnish-thing-huge-sand-battery-starts-storing-wind-energy-in-soapstone