Sunday, February 8th, 2026 11:57 pm
A beautiful clear day, and the dog spent much of the day sunning in the backyard, but as forecast, a chilly wind came up in late afternoon. The chance of rain is extremely small until mid-week.
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 09:56 pm
And I'm back from Capricon.
This is a slight exaggeration, because I commuted to Capricon this year, living about 15 minutes from the hotel and having discovered that there were no rooms with two beds available in the block when I was looking to reserve a room. (The hotel would rent me a king room in the block or a double/double outside of the block. Neither of those would have been particularly helpful.) Anyway, the result was that I was commuting to the con with a whole passel of kids.
The good news is that sales at this year's Capricon were better than the sales at my last pre-COVID Capricon back in 2020. That is largely because the sales at that previous Capricon were abjectly terrible. (Pulls up old tax paperwork to check. Yes, terrible.)
Looking at the tax paperwork causes me to realize that what I paid for two tables and a membership this year was the same as I paid for three tables and multiple memberships back in 2020. This is not a complaint that's unique to Capricon. *All* of the general-interest SF cons that I go to have boosted their table prices substantially post-COVID at the same time that their membership has gone down noticeably. This is why I no longer attempt to deal at Confusion -- there's just no prospect of making enough sales there for it to make any sort of economic sense.
Now, I understand that conventions are trying to get enough income to survive. I have worked enough cons over the years for that to be clear. But it doesn't *appear*, for instance, that the rates that are being charged to artists are a lot higher than before. (I can't speak exactly to the amounts that the artists are paying for hanging space, but that 10% commission is the same before and after COVID, to the best of my recollection.)
When I questioned the rate increase for the tables at Windycon, I was told that this is what other nearby cons charge and I *think* that referred to anime and possibly furry conventions in the area that have more members than Windycon or Capricon. I could be wrong about which cons they were referring to, as I didn't feel like it was even worth trying to make an argument (and I am *on* the Windycon concom).
All that said, my sales at Capricon were definitely ok. They were a bit less than at Windycon and I have no idea what the actual attendance at the con was like, because you couldn't divine it from the badge numbers. Maybe it was announced at Closing Ceremonies, but I was busy knocking down the table. :)
I just feel like the cons are going to price too many dealers out of the market. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe other dealers are doing a lot more volume of sales than I am, but that's not the impression that I get. I will make money on Capricon this year, but only because I commuted to the con and am only charging one membership against the table. (Which is fair, because I was really the only person who worked the table, which meant I was pretty tied to it.)
This is not a complaint about Capricon. The folks who ran the Dealers' Room were nice and competent and good to me and I *appreciate* that. This is a complaint about general-interest SF cons in general. It would be good if they were not trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the dealers, because having a large and diverse selection of dealers is an asset for a convention, IMO. And if I am going to spend all of my daytime during a convention sitting behind a dealer table, I need to be making my nut or the IRS is going to wonder what I am doing -- and so am I. Witness that I don't try to deal at Confusion any more. :)
Ok, all of that rant out of the way, I had a good time at Capricon. I had some nice conversations. I enjoyed the two panels that I was on. It would have been nice to have a concert, but that didn't work out for whatever reason. Maybe next year. The art auction was a lot of fun and it is great to have K there auctioning beside me and Dr. Bob and Mike. And K's friend from school and Julie ran art along with Lisa and did a fine job. I had fun at the open filking on Saturday -- I was too tired on Friday and had to get back early to open the dealer table (there is a recurring theme here :) ).
The new hotel seems workable, although the restriction on taking things out of the con suite was a bit of a problem when you're a dealer. It is, in any case, in the suburbs, which means that it is much easier for me to deal with. And being able to do move in on Friday made a *big* difference for me.
So I am happy to be back at Capricon for the first time since the remote con in 2021 which was the last time where I ran filking for the con. :) My perfect attendance run is well and truly blown by 2022-2025 and that's ok.
We'll try it again. :)
This is a slight exaggeration, because I commuted to Capricon this year, living about 15 minutes from the hotel and having discovered that there were no rooms with two beds available in the block when I was looking to reserve a room. (The hotel would rent me a king room in the block or a double/double outside of the block. Neither of those would have been particularly helpful.) Anyway, the result was that I was commuting to the con with a whole passel of kids.
The good news is that sales at this year's Capricon were better than the sales at my last pre-COVID Capricon back in 2020. That is largely because the sales at that previous Capricon were abjectly terrible. (Pulls up old tax paperwork to check. Yes, terrible.)
Looking at the tax paperwork causes me to realize that what I paid for two tables and a membership this year was the same as I paid for three tables and multiple memberships back in 2020. This is not a complaint that's unique to Capricon. *All* of the general-interest SF cons that I go to have boosted their table prices substantially post-COVID at the same time that their membership has gone down noticeably. This is why I no longer attempt to deal at Confusion -- there's just no prospect of making enough sales there for it to make any sort of economic sense.
Now, I understand that conventions are trying to get enough income to survive. I have worked enough cons over the years for that to be clear. But it doesn't *appear*, for instance, that the rates that are being charged to artists are a lot higher than before. (I can't speak exactly to the amounts that the artists are paying for hanging space, but that 10% commission is the same before and after COVID, to the best of my recollection.)
When I questioned the rate increase for the tables at Windycon, I was told that this is what other nearby cons charge and I *think* that referred to anime and possibly furry conventions in the area that have more members than Windycon or Capricon. I could be wrong about which cons they were referring to, as I didn't feel like it was even worth trying to make an argument (and I am *on* the Windycon concom).
All that said, my sales at Capricon were definitely ok. They were a bit less than at Windycon and I have no idea what the actual attendance at the con was like, because you couldn't divine it from the badge numbers. Maybe it was announced at Closing Ceremonies, but I was busy knocking down the table. :)
I just feel like the cons are going to price too many dealers out of the market. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe other dealers are doing a lot more volume of sales than I am, but that's not the impression that I get. I will make money on Capricon this year, but only because I commuted to the con and am only charging one membership against the table. (Which is fair, because I was really the only person who worked the table, which meant I was pretty tied to it.)
This is not a complaint about Capricon. The folks who ran the Dealers' Room were nice and competent and good to me and I *appreciate* that. This is a complaint about general-interest SF cons in general. It would be good if they were not trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the dealers, because having a large and diverse selection of dealers is an asset for a convention, IMO. And if I am going to spend all of my daytime during a convention sitting behind a dealer table, I need to be making my nut or the IRS is going to wonder what I am doing -- and so am I. Witness that I don't try to deal at Confusion any more. :)
Ok, all of that rant out of the way, I had a good time at Capricon. I had some nice conversations. I enjoyed the two panels that I was on. It would have been nice to have a concert, but that didn't work out for whatever reason. Maybe next year. The art auction was a lot of fun and it is great to have K there auctioning beside me and Dr. Bob and Mike. And K's friend from school and Julie ran art along with Lisa and did a fine job. I had fun at the open filking on Saturday -- I was too tired on Friday and had to get back early to open the dealer table (there is a recurring theme here :) ).
The new hotel seems workable, although the restriction on taking things out of the con suite was a bit of a problem when you're a dealer. It is, in any case, in the suburbs, which means that it is much easier for me to deal with. And being able to do move in on Friday made a *big* difference for me.
So I am happy to be back at Capricon for the first time since the remote con in 2021 which was the last time where I ran filking for the con. :) My perfect attendance run is well and truly blown by 2022-2025 and that's ok.
We'll try it again. :)
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 09:10 pm
By sheer coincidence, I ended up reading Alix Harrow's The Everlasting almost immediately after The Isle in the Silver Sea. Both books are ringing changes on the same big themes -- the narratives of nationalism, fate and tragedy, Spenser and Malory, depressed lady knights and evil girlbosses -- and from what I had previously read of both Harrow and Suri's work I was tbh quite surprised to find myself liking The Everlasting a bit better.
The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.
Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!
Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.
This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.
However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."
Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...
Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.
The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.
Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!
Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.
This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.
However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."
Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...
Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 07:25 pm
... arrived today! :D They always send a surprise extra packet of something, this time 'Evening Sun' sunflower, which looks to be a cultivar that produces medium-size flowers in shades of red. That ought to be fun.
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 02:33 pm
Earth still had seasons during its longest deep freeze
A planet locked in ice can still experience seasons, climate swings, and solar rhythms, according to new research. For decades, scientists pictured Snowball Earth as a long pause in climate history, with movement and change frozen in place.
A planet locked in ice can still experience seasons, climate swings, and solar rhythms, according to new research. For decades, scientists pictured Snowball Earth as a long pause in climate history, with movement and change frozen in place.
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Sunday, February 8th, 2026 02:23 pm
Today is sunny and chilly. Large patches of ground are visible, but there are still large patches of snow too.
I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 2/8/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
I've seen a flocks of sparrows. I heard a cardinal but didn't see it.
EDIT 2/8/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
I saw a male cardinal.
I am done for the night.
I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 2/8/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
I've seen a flocks of sparrows. I heard a cardinal but didn't see it.
EDIT 2/8/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
I saw a male cardinal.
I am done for the night.
Tags:
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 08:17 am
( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )
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Sunday, February 8th, 2026 11:18 am
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairings/Characters: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Rating: Mature
Length: wc 5541
Content Notes No AO3 warning apply
Creator Links: AO3 profile
Theme: Inept in Love
Summary: "We had a fight and he dumped me." Foofy humor.
Reccer's Notes This is a funny and delightful gem that just goes to show you that even when in an established relationship, John and Rodney (esp John) are horribly inept in love.
Link Proof
Pairings/Characters: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Rating: Mature
Length: wc 5541
Content Notes No AO3 warning apply
Creator Links: AO3 profile
Theme: Inept in Love
Summary: "We had a fight and he dumped me." Foofy humor.
Reccer's Notes This is a funny and delightful gem that just goes to show you that even when in an established relationship, John and Rodney (esp John) are horribly inept in love.
Link Proof
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 05:26 pm
I seem to have spent a lot of this week catching up on the sleep debt from Contabile plus the overnight ferry trip (three and a half; my usual is more like six). The con itself was a good one -- I had fun, and did some singing. Only three walks as such; however the ferry's gangway is long enough that it counts as walks for Monday and Tuesday, especially the 4.2k steps on Monday. (My goal is 3k/day, and I usually at least come close on days when I actually get out of the house and walk.)
I didn't post about it at the time, but my father died 27 years ago last Thursday. I still find myself wanting to call him to tell him about some recent development in software or science. He got me interested in both, along with science fiction. And wine. He got interested in wine and gourmet cooking to have something interesting to talk about at parties.
Links: Germany and Denmark Just Fired Microsoft: 15 Million Euros Saved | by Can Artuc and Microsoft's Quiet Exodus: Why Enterprise Developers Are Abandoning Windows for Linux Workstations (the last one is from Don Marti, who is well worth following).
And of course Meet Tombili: Istanbul’s Most Famous Street Cat And His Iconic Statue.
Sunday, February 8th, 2026 12:47 am
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.
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.
Tags:
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 09:02 pm
It was a cloudy morning and the dog was content with one early-morning excursion into the back garden, so I woke up late. When I took out kitty breakfast, I found all 3 waiting for me. The filet mignon people must be away for the weekend.
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 08:42 pm
I did end up going to the movies as the main activity of the day. The only activity, when you get down to it, especially since I stayed in bed late enough into the morning I missed the breakfast window. I found it fairly remarkable how few people were out on the streets - not surprising, but remarkable. It made me want to walk around a bit more to appreciate the relative absence of people. Not enough to go through with it, but the desire was there.
It's cold enough in my apartment for socks and a bathrobe, and I've now broken out the fingerless gloves. If I had the space in my freezer for the loaves, I'd make bread as a reason to turn on the oven, and as I don't, I'm having to make do with hot tea.
It's cold enough in my apartment for socks and a bathrobe, and I've now broken out the fingerless gloves. If I had the space in my freezer for the loaves, I'd make bread as a reason to turn on the oven, and as I don't, I'm having to make do with hot tea.
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 04:28 pm
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.
I'm still spending a lot of time in bed, but I don't have to strategize about bathroom trips. One cane is sufficient.
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 06:09 pm
Thanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fuzzyred, the series Peculiar Obligations now has its own landing page. This series features Quakers and organized crime, particularly with pirate allies.
fuzzyred, the series Peculiar Obligations now has its own landing page. This series features Quakers and organized crime, particularly with pirate allies.
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Saturday, February 7th, 2026 01:59 pm
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... )
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... )
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 09:05 pm
I was planning to type up some older ficlets I'd found in my notebook, including one for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
no_true_pair, and when I opened the doc, found an all but complete one already typed up! So here's one I had mostly prepared much earlier but apparently gave up on for some reason.
For the Sept 2024 round of No True Pair, and also for51pluscrossoverfandoms, 100fandoms & allbingo Crime Classics.
Subdivisions (1073 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, The Chronicles of St Mary's - Jodi Taylor
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Death (Discworld) & Madeleine "Lucy" Maxwell
Characters: Death (Discworld), Madeleine "Lucy" Maxwell, Leon Farrell
Additional Tags: Crossover, Alcohol, Drunkenness, Community: no_true_pair, Community: 51pluscrossoverfandoms, Community: 100fandoms, Community: allbingo, Max would like it to be known that none of this would happen if Peterson could drive straight, Death just wants to talk
Summary: Max continues trying to cheat Death, even when Death just wants to buy her a pint.
no_true_pair, and when I opened the doc, found an all but complete one already typed up! So here's one I had mostly prepared much earlier but apparently gave up on for some reason.For the Sept 2024 round of No True Pair, and also for
51pluscrossoverfandoms, 100fandoms & allbingo Crime Classics.Subdivisions (1073 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, The Chronicles of St Mary's - Jodi Taylor
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Death (Discworld) & Madeleine "Lucy" Maxwell
Characters: Death (Discworld), Madeleine "Lucy" Maxwell, Leon Farrell
Additional Tags: Crossover, Alcohol, Drunkenness, Community: no_true_pair, Community: 51pluscrossoverfandoms, Community: 100fandoms, Community: allbingo, Max would like it to be known that none of this would happen if Peterson could drive straight, Death just wants to talk
Summary: Max continues trying to cheat Death, even when Death just wants to buy her a pint.
Tags:
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 02:51 pm
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.
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.
Saturday, February 7th, 2026 02:46 pm
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.
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.
Tags: