Bambi take 2

Feb. 8th, 2026 06:48 am
vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
[personal profile] vivdunstan
Spotted again on one of Martin's Saturday walks. Seen about 500 metres from our home, as he was making his way towards the wooded river valley where he goes birdwatching. There is a thriving wild deer population locally where we live. This photo was taken looking over to the north side of the A92 main road. The deer often cross this road, sometimes coming down as far as the Firth of Tay.

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Hey, does anybody happen to know the answer to this question?

Back when Mr B and I started doing joint grocery orders, I started analyzing our budget like you do. In the course of doing so, I discovered something I hadn't realized: about a third of my "grocery" budget wasn't food. It was:

• Disposable food handling and storage supplies: plastic wrap, paper towels, aluminum foil, ziplocs, e.g.

• Personal hygiene supplies: toilet paper, bath soap, shampoo, skin lotion, menstrual supplies, toothpaste, mouthwash, Q-tips, e.g.

• Health supplies: vitamins, bandaids, NSAIDs, first aid supplies, OTC medications and supplements, e.g.

• Domestic hygiene supplies: dish detergent, dish soap, dish sponges, Windex, Pine-sol, laundry detergent, bleach, mouse traps, e.g.

None of these things individually needs to be bought every grocery trip, but that's good, because they can add up fast. Especially if you try to buy at all in volume to try to drive unit costs down. But the problem is there are so many of them, that usually you need some of them on every order.

This fact is in the back of my head whenever I hear politicians or economists or social commentators talk about the "cost of groceries": I don't know if they mean just food or the whole cost of groceries. Sometimes it's obvious. An awful lot of the relief for the poor involves giving them food (such as at a food pantry) or the funds to buy it (such as an EBT card), but very explicitly doesn't include, say, a bottle of aspirin or a box of tampons or a roll of Saran wrap. Other times, it's not, such as when a report on the cost of "groceries" only compares the prices of food items, and then makes statements about the average totals families of various sizes spend on "groceries": if they only looked at the prices of foods, does that mean they added up the prices of foods a family typically buys to generate a "grocery bill" which doesn't include the non-food groceries, or did they survey actual families' actual grocery bills and just average them without substracting the non-food groceries? Hard to say from the outside.

When we see a talking head on TV – a pundit or a politician – talking about the price of "groceries" but then say it, for example, has to do with farm labor, or the import of agricultural goods, should we assume they're just meaning "food" by the term "groceries"? Or it is a tell they've forgotten that not everything bought at a grocery store (and part of a consumer's grocery store bill) is food, and maybe are misrepresenting or misunderstanding whatever research they are leaning on? Or is it a common misconception among those who research domestic economics that groceries means exclusively food?

So my question is: given that a lot of information about this topic that percolates out to the public is based on research that the public never sees for themselves, what assumptions are reasonable for the public to make about how the field(s) which concern themselves with the "price of groceries" mean "groceries"? What fields are those and do they have a standard meaning of "groceries" and does it or does it not include non-food items?

This question brought to you by yet another video about the cost of groceries and how they might be controlled in which the index examples were the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but, as usual, not the sandwich baggy to put it in to take to school or work.

Trophy

Feb. 8th, 2026 12:14 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll




This detached from a car as it passed me. Missed me, hit a snow bank. When I returned from work, it was still there, so I collected it.

Not sure what happened, except the car's bumper also (mostly) detached.
muccamukk: Tuvok holding up his hand in the Vulcan salute. (ST: Live Long)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I sobbed like a baby, and if you're a DS9 fan, you will too.
dialecticdreamer: My work (Default)
[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
A Small Hurdle
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 1, complete
Word count (story only): 1086
[Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 11 am]


:: Aidan brings up a strange duplication of effort, and asks for an explanation. Part of the Edison’s Mirror (Teague Family) story arc. ::


Back to A Hopeful Errand
To the Edison's Mirror Landing Page
On to



Aidan picked up each of the bills that Deirdre had dropped onto the table, his frown deepening as he laid them out, carefully turning them all to face the same way in the stack. He tapped them with his index and middle fingers held together. “Win… She left this money to pay for the meal, and I presume to tip the server. You changed plans to add a meal for Mac and Ed, which is appreciated, but what should happen with this?” He tapped the bills again, silently.

Win’s hands slowed to a stop, resting her fingertips on the edge of the table across from him. “What would you do?”
Read more... )
[syndicated profile] file770_feed

Posted by Mike Glyer

(1) THE CRUCIAL INGREDIENT. Max Gladstone reminds everyone, “Writing Doesn’t Always Look the Way You Think” at The Third Place. A couple days ago Penny Arcade posted a great scathing comic about an ad for an LLM; the ad promised … Continue reading
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
In a generally unsurprising plot twist, all three of the Babylon 5 vids in this year's Festivids were by me. I haven't gotten around to properly reposting them to my signed vid account, but for now the signed vids are uploaded to the anonymous account and they can also be downloaded by clicking through to Vimeo as an interim measure until I get them properly posted for download.

I also added them to my Sholio Vids collection.

Some random notes on this year's vidding under the cut.

Talking a lot about Babylon 5 )

Oops

Feb. 7th, 2026 05:13 pm
koshka_the_cat: Beach! (Default)
[personal profile] koshka_the_cat
Remember the desk I was painting during break until covid stopped everything? I was going to put the wax top layer on it today. It went fine on the back. Then it peeled off the side, once again, like Tinkerbell nail polish. I guess the sanding I thought did nothing worked? Oops.

I peeled off everything but the front drawer, which had also been sanded, and tried waxing that. It worked.

I'm not sure about repainting. It's fine with just the drawer green. The back doesn't show, obviously. I painted that as a test.

IKEA should sell paintable options. You're already building it, so why not paint?

And the cats woke me up in the middle of the night. A kitchen drawer was open, the tray from my espresso machine was pulled out, a lamp was on the floor, a small scratcher was feet from where it should be, and they crashed into the food and water bowls in my room. I think it was all of them because they were all lurking when I woke up.

Ahhhhhhh, sweet sweet steroids

Feb. 7th, 2026 04:28 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
I got a steroid shot in my right knee on Wednesday, and miraculously I can almost walk again.

I'm still spending a lot of time in bed, but I don't have to strategize about bathroom trips. One cane is sufficient.

Website Updates

Feb. 7th, 2026 06:09 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Thanks to [personal profile] fuzzyred, the series Peculiar Obligations now has its own landing page.  This series features Quakers and organized crime, particularly with pirate allies.

[navel-gazing] reading, fast & slow

Feb. 7th, 2026 11:21 pm
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] kaberett

At some point in proceedings (depression? pain? migraine? dense technical text for the PhD? poetry?), I realise, I have gone from reading Unusually Quickly to still reading More? Than Population Norm? (75ish books last year, of which 15ish were graphic novels or otherwise not-a-novel's-worth-of-words), but no faster than I'd be able to read the text aloud -- "hearing" each word in my head, and often rereading sentences repeatedly.

This is in contrast to how I type, which is much faster than I can speak comprehensibly (... though I now recall that I am in fact often asked to Slow The Fuck Down when providing information verbally).

I have over the last little bit been tentatively experimenting with trying not to read each word "aloud", mentally, and instead treating The Written Word as something that doesn't always need to be (pseudo-)vocalised.

It feels weird. It's an active effort. I am extremely dubious about the impact on how much information I retain; Further Study Required. I think this is probably how I used to read (when?); I'm not sure what changed; I'm unsettled.

(And I want to post something to Dreamwidth before bed, and this is a thing I was thinking about a lot while almost-but-not-quite finishing Index, A History of the -- I'm at a point I'd ordinarily count as "finished" but obviously it is in this instance both important and rewarding to read the index, all two of it, so here y'go.)

brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I watched the whole thing, start to finish, and I thought it was good. Not as good as Paris (2024) or Pyeongchang (2018), but good. Both A. and L., who watched it with me, were kind of freaked out by the large-head dancers of Puccini, Rossini, and Verdi, but they were actually one of my favorite parts of that section. The performance by Andrea Bocelli was enjoyable, but at the same time felt kind of stuck in. The multi-site Parade of Nations struck me as a good idea, because athletes not being able to march in the parade because they were up on the mountain has long been a problem for the Winter Games — I hope future host cities make this into a tradition. I got a laugh out of the DJ switching over to The Barber of Seville for the Italian team to walk in!

I also have to give NBC a big thumbs-down for one of their choices during the Parade of Nations: There were only about half a dozen nations that NBC chose not to show in the streaming version of the ceremony (there might have been more skipped over in the broadcast version), and they picked Mongolia for one of them?! WTAF! Mongolia is always one of the best-dressed teams and I think skipping them was a terrible idea!

And while we're on the subject of team uniforms: I will be so, so, so, SO glad when Team USA lets someone other than Ralph Lauren design their uniforms! (And just in case anyone from Team USA is reading this: By "someone other than Ralph Lauren," I don't mean Tommy Hilfiger. I mean someone actually different.)

arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
I habitually keep a lot of browser windows (and tabs) open, and take advantage of the browser's feature to reopen windows and tabs on restart. This isn't going to work on KDE, though the situation is not as dire as it was on Pop!_OS.

On MacOS, you can right click browser's icon on the task bar, and get a menu of all the windows (not tabs) the browser has open, in alphabetical order by the title of the window's currently selected tab. Each takes one line, and you need a lot of windows for them not to fit on a modern monitor; IIRC, even if you manage that the menu proves to be scrollable. I.e. you can find that window, unless of course you've selected a different tab and forgot to go back to the tab with the name you recognize.

This isn't as good as one past browser/window manager combination I used, which also included tabs in the list, and the change to MacOS took some getting used to. (For a while, I'd often have multiple copies of the same tab, since I simply couldn't find them.)

But it's orders of magnitude better than Pop!_OS, which offers you a selection among thumbnails of your various windows (not tabs), which are of course indistinguishable at that scale. (It had the same problem with shell windows.)

KDE offers a choice of image only or image-and-title. But it displays the various images horizontally, so a long title takes up too much space. And even a window with a tiny title takes up too much space, because of the inclusion of the useless and unwanted thumbnail.

Read more... )

第五年第二十九天

Feb. 8th, 2026 06:58 am
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] guardian_learning
部首
手 part 15
拐, to turn a corner; 拒, to refuse; 拔, to pull out pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

语法
3.1 应该
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
此, this; 此外, in addition; 从此, from then on pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
来者不拒, to take on all comers
他是什么人你应该知道, you should know what he is
从此相安无事直到今天, from then on peace has continued through today

Me:
我拒绝被拔牙,我太害怕了。
咱们在拐角见面吧。

Heads

Feb. 7th, 2026 09:24 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

This afternoon, [personal profile] diffrentcolours and I were watching a documentary about chemistry with Jim Al-Khalili. (D has done sterling work getting the TV to be able to talk to his file server, so it's way easier to watch random things he has downloaded for us...like this BBC documentary about the history of chemistry.)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, D said of Dr. Al-Khalili, "He has a good scientist head."

"He really does!" I replied immediately.

Then I paused.

Then I said "Wait, I don't know what that means, and I don't know why I was so convinced of it."

Maybe it's the baldness?

Bald/shaved heads are so good. This came up at transgym this morning too: I was complaining about how much sweat my hair has absorbed because it's too long now --the last haircut I had was on my birthday! 3-4 weeks is plenty for my hair to need cutting again; the one problem with really short hair is it doesn't stay that way for long. And my barber has suddenly turned into a laundromat -- seriously, it only took a month for it to be open as a completely different kind of business! -- so I need to try a new one and I haven't had time and ugh...maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, as I was complaining, I was overhead by F, a guy with a shaved head, who said "enjoy it while it lasts!" Apparently he's still in his 20s, bless him. But it got me and our friend A talking about how much we like bald guys as an aesthetic, and then D told us about the subreddit for bald people, where guys share photos of them with thinning/receding hair, all sad about it, and then photos of them bald, happy, no longer giving a fuck. I think it's that "the way to win the game of conventional attractiveness is not to play" transformation that makes this seem sexy to me.

(Not that baldness can't be conventionally attractive, but a lot of balding guys seem to think that. Even if they're just having to get used to the change or confronting their mortality or whatever they do, I don't know. But it seems to do them some good to have to come to terms about it, if not embrace it.)

(Plus obviously bald heads are sexy because a nice close shave is fun to touch, and in the right circumstances I think the stubble can feel good too...)

Early Humans

Feb. 7th, 2026 02:51 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
These 773,000-year-old fossils may reveal our shared human ancestor

Exceptionally well-dated fossils from Morocco capture a moment nearly 800,000 years ago, right at a major turning point in Earth’s magnetic history.

Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic signature locked into the surrounding sediments. The hominin remains show a blend of ancient and more modern features, placing them near a pivotal branching point in human evolution. These individuals likely represent an African population close to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans
.

Birdfeeding

Feb. 7th, 2026 02:46 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is sunny and cold.  Much of the snow has melted.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/7/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I refilled the hopper feeder.

I've seen a female cardinal.

EDIT 2/7/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

There were two cardinals in the forest garden, but it was hard to tell colors at dusk.

I am done for the night.
 

Bye Bye Apple

Feb. 7th, 2026 11:48 am
arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
One of the traditional MacOS features is a single dock, that appears at the bottom of one of your monitors. From time to time it moves to another monitor; it took me a year or two to figure out that the moves were not random, but happened when you moved your mouse too close to the bottom of some screen that didn't currently contain the dock. This would be interpreted as a request to move the dock to that screen, on top of whatever you were trying to do there.

The KDE equivalent is called a panel, and can contain more than just the sort of things MacOS puts in their dock. You can have as many panels as you want, on as many of your monitors as you want, even 2 or 3 on the same monitor if you prefer. They don't have to have the same contents - you can put a panel with clock and various status widgets on the top of your screen, approximating what MacOS has there, and a second panel at the bottom, with task bar and related items, approximating what MacOS has there. Or you can do what I did, and put all of these in one panel, at the bottom of the screen, but put such a panel on all the screens you have.

There are some glitches, and not all of them may be learning curve. But most of them involve configuring the extra flexibility MacOS lacks.

This morning I started the day on my Mac, taking advantage of Safari's existing history to conveniently reorder a product I'd just run low on. The dock made one of its unintended moves. That's been an aggravation approximately forever. But this time instead of snarling at Apple, I smiled happily at the thought that soon I won't be dealing with this any more.

Blockout (1989)

Feb. 7th, 2026 12:40 pm
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
[personal profile] pauraque
The splash screen of this game credits California Dreams, a familiar publishing label used by Logical Design Works for many of their home computer releases in the '80s and early '90s. As a kid I assumed these games were made in my home state of California, but nope. Almost all of them were developed in Poland by P.Z. Karen Co., a studio that primarily produced games for the Western market. (Another interesting title they developed was 1991's Solidarność ["Solidarity"], "a political simulation of the Polish underground freedom movement that culminated in the Solidarity trade union in 1980", which I have never played, though I am a little tempted.)

rectangular well with a wireframe grid has begun to fill with colorful tetris pieces as a wireframe piece waits to be dropped from the top

But today we're talking about Blockout. It's 3D Tetris. Instead of a side view, you're looking down into a well into which you must drop the wireframe pieces. In addition to using the arrow keys to move the pieces, you also get six rotation keys (clockwise and counterclockwise around three different axes of rotation). The rest of the gameplay is just as you'd expect; if you manage to fill a layer of the well, that layer disappears like a Tetris row, etc.

I did have the DOS version of this game as a kid, but what I mainly remember is watching my mom play it. )

Blockout is free to download or play in your browser if you want to find out if your spatial reasoning abilities are more like mine or more like my mom's.

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