davidgillon | Reading

I had just been thinking about Jack Shepherd because he was one of the founding members of the Actors' Company which had sparked off in 1972 with Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, whose memoir I was re-reading last night. He'd left the company by the time of their adaptation of R. D. Laing's Knots (1970) and thus does not appear in the 1975 film which seems to have been their only moving picture record, leaving me once again with strictly photographic evidence of this sort of reverse supergroup experiment in democratic theater. (Shepherd at far right resembles a pre-Raphaelite pin-up in jeans, but I like to think if I had Caroline Blakiston's arm round my shoulders I wouldn't look that brooding about it.) Then again, I missed most of his film and famous television work, too: my reaction to his death is derived entirely from his astonishing Renfield in the BBC Count Dracula (1977), who holds more than a candle to the icons of Dwight Frye or Pablo Álvarez Rubio, a heartbreakingly weird and human performance of a character who may not be entirely sane in a world with vampires in it, which doesn't mean he's not to be trusted about them. I loved how much of his lucidity slides between his Victorian hysteria and his careful impersonation of a reformed lunatic which is not always and for good reason convincing. I loved his kiss of Judi Bowker's Mina, not his master's initatory drink, but a damned soul's benison, the offering of his life. Not just because he became my default horror icon, I thought about him more than any other character from that sometimes surprisingly faithful adaptation. His actor had such a knack in the role for the liminal, death seems on some level too definite to believe.

Current Music: Jeff Tweedy, "Enough"

yhlee

Lee Brodie's Starting FORTH, on the Forth programming language; m5stack Cardputer v.1.1 running ryu10's M5CardForth (Github)

I have Forth (programming language - see e.g. Leo Brodie's Starting Forth) running on this smol M5stack Cardputer v.1.1 (ESP32-S3) courtesy of ryu10's M5CardForth, which is also faster than my spending the next decade teaching myself ESP32-S3 assembler. :)

Next step: write a very smol choose-your-own-adventure-style text adventure in Forth.

Next step after that: ???

Next step after that: Considering porting either the Shuos Academy text adventure WIP [1] or Winterstrike (originally written for Failbetter Games for StoryNexus, which will be sunsetted by Jan 2026) to M5CardForth for the CardPuter because I am a TROLL. It could be a dumbass household game experience. :) :)

Heck, I could port some version of turnabout's fair prey or The Amiable Planet (Twine) to this! I love the thought of making TINY parser IF / text adventures for this smol device.

(All of these are my games. I give myself permission?!)

[1] I was writing/coding this for Choice of Games but we mutually agreed to cancel the contract because I was flooded out that year and it was no longer a doable workload alongside...finding new housing etc. I still have like 60% of the codebase already written in ChoiceScript and outline, though! I'd have to refactor but hell, I'd have to refactor anything. I can pretend it's pseudocode. :)

(I need a break from the current schoolwork, what can I say.)

oursin

We perceive that there does not appear to be any gender-confusion, or relationships with military helmets, connected with this particular tortoise, or maybe no-one noticed: Gramma the Galápagos tortoise, oldest resident of San Diego Zoo, dies at about 141. Not quite old enough to have met that there Charles Darwin, then.

***

Reversal of Fates: Access Through Photographs can be a Counterbalance

Ongoing digitization and cataloging work not only serves the interests of scholars and manuscript communities—it also creates crucial, publicly-accessible provenance records that provide an increasingly robust bulwark against manuscript theft and trafficking.

Sing it.

***

Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy:

“A lot of that music from that era, the record companies did not keep backups. They were all destroyed, almost all. And it’s all up to the record collectors. They’re the ones who kind of saved the music from that era,”
....
Superior to a random recording uploaded to YouTube with no accompanying information, the database includes things like where the song was recorded and when, as well as lists of musicians and composers who worked on the songs.

***

I think I may have mentioned at some time the phenomenon of the 'monkey walk': Before Tinder, there was the Monkey Parade… . Though some recent works read for review incline me to think that one reason for the decline not mentioned in that piece was the rise of the coffee-bar - indoors in the warm with a juke-box, and the site of massive 50s moral panic around The Young.

***

Statue to 'remarkable' woman who escaped slavery:

A statue to a "remarkable and brave" woman who fled slavery and torture in the US has been unveiled in the fishing town in northern England where she found freedom.
Mary Ann Macham spent weeks hiding in woods in Virginia before stowing away on a ship, eventually arriving in North Shields in the early 1830s.
She was taken in by a Quaker family, married a local man and remained in the town until she died aged 91.

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

oursin

Happy birthday,

ellen_fremedon,

marymac,

nja and

truepenny!

yhlee

I'm informed this is a 1981 Ashford Traditional. I pounced on the secondhand listing as spinning wheels in working order (especially modern-ish wheels) are very scarce in my region, especially at a low price point. She's in incredibly good condition and spins beautifully! She's my first Saxony wheel, to go with the Ashford Traveller. I'm also told the bobbins ought to be inter-compatible (I have bobbins for both the larger and smaller flyers).

The pink-magenta is IxChel's North Ronaldsay blend (North Ronaldsay Sheep 40%, Blue Faced Leicester 30%, Silver infused Seaweed 10%, Mulberry Silk 10%, Cashmere 10%).

sovay

Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.

I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.

Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to

spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.

I really appreciate

asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and

ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.

Current Music: Hen Ogledd, "Scales Will Fall"

cosmolinguist

I had a pretty good day for it being the blackest day on my calendar.

Twenty years ago today my brother died. It was thanksgiving day, that year. He died in a car accident. No other cars involved, he wasn't drunk, the weather was fine, he was on familiar roads...

So there was no reason for it, no lesson to be learned from it or cause to take up because of it.

Normally I will have a wee dram for the occasion, but tonight I went to the gym instead, knowing that the rest of the week is too full to allow it and not wanting to let the good effect of actually making it to trans gym on Saturday wither away already. It was a good choice but means I got home and as usual went upstairs to a shower and bed.

It was a pretty good day. I woke up absurdly early as usual but didn't feel tired. I got up and did my morning chores (opened the curtains, emptied the dishwasher, made a pot of tea), made breakfast and started work an hour early. My manager is off all week and his manager is off today, so while I'm awaiting feedback from them on a report that's perilously close to its deadline now, it's not my problem if they don't get it to me. I didn't have many meetings either (though the two I did have were bad enough), it was much warmer than it had been at the end of last week and the sun was even out sometimes.

Most of all, what made this November good is that I wasn't fretting about my dog dying (like last year), I didn't break my ankle and need an operation (like two years ago), and a dear friend wasn't having a psychotic episode where I was the only person she'd talk to (like three years ago).

November just sucks.

But this one has been okay. Yes it's been full of work and of counterprotesting fascists, but it's also had some fun stuff and there's more happening this week: a birthday party, a wedding, a new Knives Out movie, a thanksgiving dinner that I'm not cooking...

Twenty years.

It doesn't feel long ago.

And yet I've also been so many people since then. I'm sad I didn't have the chance to find out who he would have been.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3172/

https://xkcd.com/3172/

umadoshi

I complain sometimes about time and the surreality of the passage thereof and whatnot, but this morning I had several minutes of genuinely wondering if the way the year is barreling toward its end meant the first Sunday of Advent had already passed without my even noticing. I'm not sure if something about the timing of US Thanksgiving threw me off, or if it's as simple as my not having put "Advent begins" on my calendar, which I think I usually note in advance. (In practical terms it'd be fine; as it happens, I'm planning to use a "burn a bit every day of December" Advent candle, which probably means not breaking out the wreath for the four Sundays. But still.)

I often have weird dreams and don't usually remember much about them, but until today I'm not sure I'd ever before woken up from a dream where I was watching a movie? In the case of this dream, I was at the theatre watching what was officially a Newsflesh film adaptation, but in the sense that (from what I know of it, never having seen it) the World War Z movie is based on that book, which is to say, really not at all. ("Lead" characters who were supposed to be Georgia and Shaun, yes, but nothing to do with [*checks notes*] characters-as-people, zombies, viruses, or politics, and possibly not journalism, either. I think there was some sort of lab creating humanoid/animal mixes of some sort, possibly giving them guns.) It went on for quite some time.

My dream-self was appalled, of course, but at least glad to think Seanan had presumably gotten a decent chunk of money for the rights. She's got cats to feed!

cosmolinguist

Last Monday morning I was supposed to have a voice therapy appointment but our internet was borked. I had to drag D out of bed just after 9 and make him deal with a confusing and mysterious problem. He bodged a solution really quickly but I was supposed to have a voice therapy appointment at 9:30 and I'd texted the clinician warning her that I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it. We had

Thank you for letting me know. Unfortunately as it is such late notice this will count as a missed appointment. Please let me know if you would like to re-book the session, and if there is anything we can do to support attending going forwards. If you do not reply within 7 days we will assume that you do not wish to continue voice therapy and you will be discharged.

Something about that "if you would like to re-book the session" rubbed me the wrong way -- I waited years for this referral! -- and all of a sudden I didn't want to re-book. I was put off by how the technical problems were handled at the first appointment, and even though they didn't recur and I was confident I wouldn't have them again because once she agreed to use Teams I gave her my work address where Teams works fine every day so I didn't anticipate any recurrence.

I just. Still felt weird about it, like I was doing it wrong by treating this as an investigation about something I'm curious about rather than something where I had clear and specific Transition Goals in mind. Indigo might be a little too patient-led for me, heh; I appreciate the ways it's more flexible and less judgmental than the old Gender Identity Clinic system, but this isn't the first time I've struggled with mismatched expectations: I'm expecting some kind of information that doesn't exist and even when I ask for it I'm told to look at social media websites I don't use; I'm like you're the NHS, don't you have a photocopy-burned brochure for me?

(This feeling I'm having here is like a grain of sand in comparison to the deserts-worth of the same feeling that I'm having when it comes to top surgery... I've written thousands of words about that so far and it's still not ready to share.)

It just felt like too high a hill to climb, so I've let the seven days go by and now I'm discharged from the service. I hope someone else who's chomping at the bit for their voice to sound different in some particular way is making good use of the appointment instead.

oursin

Last week was definitely a trifecta of Electrical Stuff.

Okay, I had been suspecting for some time that the fan heater in the front room was an ex-fan heater, and plugging it into a different socket (rather than an extension cord) confirmed this.

Have now ordered a convection heater (Which Best Buy), allegedly arriving tomorrow.

Last Tuesday around 6 am there was a power cut - it only lasted about 90 minutes, but involved a certain amount of resetting appliances which had become confused - also UKPowerNet only finally alerted me about this event by text several hours after things were back to more or less normal.

What I had not expected and accounted for in resetting things was that my clock alarm had decided that the time my alarm was set for was 6 am, so I got a rude awakening the following morning.

The other thing - and this was positively sinister - was that my electric toothbrush suddenly started buzzing away all by itself on the bathroom window ledge and was very very reluctant to be switched off. How is it not scary when this sort of thing happens?

Anyway, next morning it was apathetic about being switched on and is now an ex-toothbrush. A new one - not a top Which Best Buy as those are hugely expensive, but about third on the list which is on promotion at various outlets - currently expected. I have a backup but would rather this had not happened the week I am due for a trip to the dental hygienist.

the_comfortable_courtesan

Your amenuensis is pleas'd to announce that there will be a little Christmas treat this year: The Cathcart Apocrypha: Volume 6: Times Changing Belowstairs will be downloadable from the website from 24th December:

Clorinda Cathcart, now the widowed Marchioness of Bexbury, has undergone a radical change of circumstances. These changes have not left her household unaffected; nor have events in their lives stood still.

Enjoy!

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

oursin

Happy birthday,

claudine and

littlered2!

cosmolinguist

"I gotta show you something," Dad said, and got up from the sofa so disappeared from the camera. My mom was left looking boggled; she didn't know what he was doing. There didn't seem to be anything in the conversation -- about them decorating their house for Christmas, I think -- to hint even to her what he was thinking of.

He came back quickly, with a big white fuzzy teddy bear. The bear was wearing a blue knitted scarf and something I couldn't quite see on his forehead that might have been ski goggles or earmuffs. Dad was waving a white fuzzy paw at me. It was the cutest damn thing.

He explained about how he saw it in the window of the local secondhand store a few times, and that the bear was asking my dad to bring him home, so one day he just went and bought it. He said it didn't cost much.

"I'm trying to think of a name for him," Dad said. "I'm calling him Bob for now but that isn't quite right." Mom asked if I had an idea for a name, and honestly my mind had immediately gone to Bernard but I think that'd be too fancy for them. Dad mentioned Frank which I like a lot; reminds me of my old pal from a volunteering group who's retired even from that now; a lovely old blind guy called Frank with a guide dog called Ronnie.

Frank, or whatever he's going to be called, lies on what I think of as the guest bed but my parents call "my" bed because they think the guest room is my room. (For a long time, my mom was calling the basically-theoretical bedroom in the as-yet-unfinished basement "Chris's room" which...makes my head hurt just to think about. I think now that the basement is finished it's being called just "the bedroom downstairs," which is a vast improvement.) "Your dad had been wanting to get a bear for your bed for a while," Mom said, which again is a strange sentence.

But Frank is lovely. Even when Dad put him back, his black quarter-zip was covered in fuzz from the bear. It was very cute. It's really heartening that he continues, in his dad way, to just get Ideas in his head and do these little whimsical things that my mom can only humor him in; it's one of the few things my parents don't share.

mrissa

I've mentioned here before that one of my big projects this year is my involvement with The Vertigo Project, which now has a webpage so the rest of you can see what we've been doing. Earlier today I facilitated the first creative therapy-style writing workshop through that group, and it was really lovely--and is just the tip of the iceberg on what this group is doing.

Specifically, you can now read all the new work they've commissioned from me! Friends, it's a lot. It's journaling prompts for people who would like to use writing to process some of their own vertigo experiences. But also it's the following stories and poems:

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (story), safe conduct through strange new worlds

Club Planet Vertigo (poem), this is not the dance I wanted to do

Greetings from Innerspace (poem), my orbits are eccentric

The Nature of Nemesis (poem), me and Clark Kent know what's what

On the Way Down (poem), falling hard

Preparation (poem), sometimes we're just literal, okay

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (story), when the waves hit you even on dry land, it's good to have someone who's willing to swim against the current for you

The Torn Map (story), rewriting the pieces of the former world into something new

The main page also has links to some of the other aspects of the project, which includes a nonfiction book, dance, puppetry, a podcast with a physical therapist, and more. Please feel welcome to explore it all.

chestnut_pod posting in

poetry

The Old Usher
Oliver Reynolds
2010, from Hodge

--

for Farès Moussa

I have
shouted Lights! in the foyer as the show begins

I have
opened and closed a million doors
Push and Pull stamping my palms

I have
woken with Good Evening on my lips

I have
ROH in moles over my left nipple

I have
Tchaikovsky as a heart-beat

I have
told ten thousand bladders
It’s down the slope and on the right

I have
stood at the bottom of Floral Hall stairs
with Peter Bramley at the top
tapping the metal hand-rail with his ring
to annoy me

I have
bent my head to complaints about the row in front
the big hair-do, the change-jingler, those who snore or smell

I have
turned a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a stopped nostril

I have
opened and closed a million doors
Push and Pull stamping my palms

I have
waited in the wings to present flowers
cygnets wafting past me in a crush of tutus
each back tight with the cordage of muscle

I have
sold ices with Susie Boyle

I have
passed the black-and-white monitor at Stage Door
and felt proud to see Haitink in the pit
a bottled homunculus preserved in music

I have
opened my locker on a vista of dirty shirts

I have
killed a moth for Monica Mason
It wants to settle on me!
she who once danced her death in the Rite
now frightened of millimetres of flutter

I have
Tchaikovsky as a heart-beat

I have
bassoons and strings planned for my last-act death
the weightless pas-de-chat
lifting me out of this ninth life
into the proscenium’s eternal gold

I have
perfected my farewell
a final turning-out of the pockets
as I rise and vanish into air
swirling with the confetti of ticket-stubs

I have
shouted Lights! as the show begins

I have

kaberett

Reading. ... I think, like, a page or two of Descartes (Treatise on Man), and that's it?

OH. NO. I also finished my first pass through indexing The National Trust Cookbook for EYB. That's right. That's a thing I did.

Watching. Three Whole Entire Episodes of Beddybyes, halfway through the third of which the toddler (who felt it was Very Important that we saw it) pretty much fell asleep where it was sat.

Playing. RIDICULOUS Inkulinati run for Preposterous Amounts Of Prestige.

Cooking. Medlar jelly (plain, spiced). Quince sorbet. Several bread. A batch of buttermilk pancakes. Some terrible First, Burn Your Lettuce, thereby ticking another item off the current Cook The Book project. Buttermilk pancakes.

Eating. One of the CHILLIS from the CHILLI PLANTS we brought HOME from the GREENHOUSE just after first frost (but they were fine); also A turned the small pile of peppers that broke off the sweet pepper I brought home on a bike, still green, into akuri this morning.

Exploring. Important sploshy stomp through the puddles of Barking Park. I... think that's it?

Growing. I have NOT sown any physalis or lemongrass in the electric propagator, to get them hopefully Established by the time I need it for Other Things in the new year. This is a deliberate decision. They can go in next week.

... and now it's very definitely time for bed, goodnight world. <3

sovay

My ability to get any sleep has deranged like a spiderweb on LSD, but just a moment ago in the street it was thinly but distinctly snowing. I turned on WHRB and got Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time (1944). I still can't believe Opera Boston folded right before they would have staged the Mozart-out-of-Eliot Hermetic crack of The Midsummer Marriage (1955). I can't believe in impending Thanksgiving.

Current Music: Girl Ray, "Space Song"

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David Gillon

Flat Out

November 2025

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David Gillon

Reading

Is your heart hiding from your fire?

emotional support coding

Oddments

Just one thing: 25 November 2025

(no subject)

emotional support spinning

Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken

Twenty years

Fifteen Years

Discombobulation and dreamstuff

Catching up on other news

Electrical shocks

A forthcoming treatlet

Just one thing: 24 November 2025

(no subject)

A bear for my bed

The Vertigo Project: new work!

"The Old Usher," by Oliver Reynolds

vital functions

The dusty light, the final hour

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November 2025

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