Sunshine Revival Post

Jul. 2nd, 2025 01:23 pm
yourlibrarian: Every Kind of Craft on green (Every Kind of Craft Green - yourlibraria)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) As part of [community profile] sunshine_revival's first challenge: "Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community."

I just shared some necklaces I made a few months back over at [community profile] everykindofcraft. I did a lot of beading in the first 13 years after I took it up, but things have been rather start and stop in the last 10. A craft store closeout + a challenge from a relative got me making some new things in the last few months. That probably also contributed to my starting [community profile] everykindofcraft here, because I saw various people posting wonderful stuff that not many people were seeing, whereas on Pillowfort some general craft communities there are always getting posts.

Hopefully we can get more crafters sharing here!

2) Have been watching a slew of Apple+ shows as our subscription cutoff nears. The miniseries Disclaimer was framed in an interesting way, one which I suspect had a lot more clarity in multimedia than in the book, but perhaps not. It uses multiple narrative voices and POV for the narration, including second person, first person, and some omniscient narrative. This was pretty relevant because of who was being framed (literally) and who actually got to have their voice(s) heard. Read more... )

3) Surface is a story told in a much more straightforward manner even though it also involves an unreliable narrator of sorts in that our central character had memory loss and is trying to piece together her past which also involves a parental mystery. Read more... )

4) Also saw the movie Wolfs, which is fine but largely a vehicle for us to watch Pitt and Clooney do fun stuff. Read more... )

5) Finished The Big Conn and Cowboy Cartel, two documentaries about big crime. I found the former much more interesting, even though I'd heard about the case before. What was probably the most striking about both was the role of the media in precipitating change. Read more... )

6) Careme was marketed as the story of the first celebrity chef, who served Napoleon, Tallyrand and others. It was certainly about far more than cooking. Read more... )

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Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

"I Already Decided" for Bases

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:45 pm
ceu: (asami)
[personal profile] ceu posting in [community profile] dreamwidthlayouts
Title: (I'm supposed to win!) I already decided!
Credit to: [personal profile] ceu
Base style: Bases (Tropical)
Type: CSS
Best resolution: 1200x800 | Desktop only
Tested in: Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox
Features: Two column, fixed width, supports only custom text & navigation, custom background



live preview/usage @ [personal profile] blackthorncity

(fake cut for instructions and code)

All is Well

Jun. 30th, 2025 12:15 pm
yourlibrarian: (MERL-ArthurLake-kathyh)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) A few more trip photos posted over at [community profile] common_nature, these of Oneonta Gorge.

2) Saw The Flash film and found it better than expected but also so-so. The big problem to me was the lead himself. Granted his character isn't really written to have any charm but a good bit of the humor fell flat for me, and when he was on screen twice as much it made it worse. Read more... )

3) Just an update about the bed situation listed in my last post. Everything went well! The youngsters delivering the bed had no problem with taking the old one down to the moving truck, and moving the other one to another room. Read more... )

4) A new wrinkle in the last few weeks is that during yet another heavy rain we got a leak near our front door. Read more... )

5) I quite liked this diagram of the interaction between entertainment production and fan activities. This came from an interview on Henry Jenkins' blog about a new set of textbooks for studying fandom.



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How to help

Jun. 29th, 2025 02:17 pm
elisi: Snoopy w/Keffiyeh (Free Palestine)
[personal profile] elisi
If you want to donate to help people in Gaza, The Sameer Project is a good choice.

~

I don't really have any interest in Glastonbury, but if you're curious about what's happening this year (ie Kneecap specifically), here's a video laying a lot of it out very clearly:



~

And a Petition: Legislate to Reverse Supreme Court Decision on Transgender Women
ozma914: Haunted Noble County Indiana (Haunted Noble County)
[personal profile] ozma914
 History Press finally matched our upcoming book with its cover! It might not seem like a big deal, but it was a bit unnerving to see Haunted Noble County, Indiana up for preorder everywhere, but without a cover to ... well, cover it.

 


 But wait--there's more. I decided to Google the book so I could give you all the links to it, and discovered Google is now giving AI overviews to anything you search. I can't say I'm thrilled. I'd much rather dig the info up by myself, but I bow to our future computer overlords so, just for fun, here's what artificial intelligence had to say about the book:

 

 


AI Overview
 
"Noble County, Indiana, has its share of ghost stories and haunted locations, including Albion's Rose Hill Cemetery, the Cromwell Library, and the Strand Theatre in Kendallville, according to a local author. A book titled "Haunted Noble County, Indiana" by Mark R. Hunter and Emily Jane Hunter details these and other spooky tales. 
 

 

Specific Haunted Locations:
 

 


 Okay, so a couple of notes. First of all, there is no Haunted Noble County Facebook group. I already have three FB pages: My main one, my author page, and the one for Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights that I never merged into the Mark R. Hunter author page. Plus the page I run for the Albion Fire Department. I never even considered creating a group.

Hm. Maybe a group for all our books?

Second, "theatre"? Is the AI British? That's where "1984" came from, after all.

 Third, "another high hill"? It found all those other details, but couldn't be bothered to identify Diamond Lake Hill? Also, the poem takes place on Sand Hill.

 

Diamond Lake hill, also known as Diamond Hill. See? I found it.


 

Well, any publicity is good publicity, I suppose. Anyway, you can now see the cover and preorder the book at places including:


 

Haunted Noble County, Indiana – Arcadia Publishing

Haunted Noble County, Indiana (Haunted America): Hunter, Mark R., Hunter, Emily Jane: 9781467156066: Amazon.com: Books

Haunted Noble County, Indiana by Mark R. Hunter, Emily Jane Hunter, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

Haunted Noble County, Indiana - (Haunted America) by Mark R Hunter & Emily Jane Hunter (Paperback) : Target

Haunted Noble County, Indiana - Hunter, Mark R; Hunter, Emily Jane - Dussmann - Das Kulturkaufhaus  (Is this ... German?)

Haunted Noble County, Indiana Book By Mark R Hunter,emily Jane Hunter, (Paperback) | Indigo  (Wait, the cover's not on this one yet.)

Haunted Noble County, Indiana (Haunted America) | Port Book and News

Haunted Noble County, Indiana - Mark R. Hunter, Emily Jane Hunter - häftad (9781467156066) | Adlibris Bokhandel

Results for "Haunted Noble County, Indiana" | Bookmarks | Non-Profit and Independent Bookstore

Haunted Noble County, Indiana / Najlacnejšie knihy (I have no idea where this one's located, but they've decided Emily wrote the book solo.)

Haunted Noble County, Indiana - 三民網路書店  (Um ....?)

Haunted Noble County, Indiana │ 誠品線上 - 閱讀與生活的無盡想像  (More um ...?)

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/haunted-noble-county-indiana_mark-r-hunter_emily-jane-hunter/54876559

Haunted Noble County, Indiana (Haunted America) (Paperback) | Forever Books 

I kept finding more and it was getting ridiculous, so I gave up. Sometimes I found some of our other books, including some of our self-published ones in places they should never have gotten to, but who am I to complain? 

I assume that, like our book Images of America: Albion and Noble County, the new one will be available in e-book and hardcover. At the moment an audio book isn't in the cards, but don't you want to see the photos? Sure you do.

 


Anxiety

Jun. 23rd, 2025 07:21 pm
yourlibrarian: Chani and Paul (OTH-Chani and Paul - myrmidon.png)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) I've been seeing a lot more posting on [community profile] common_nature, very encouraging! Have added the first of my waterfall photos there, of Latourelle Falls.

2) Looks like there is a spammer at work on Squidgeworld. I got 3 comments to different posts within a few hours today, two with outright solicitations for commissions.

3) Saw Dune 2, and thought it was ok. It's almost as if the movie was made to be the direct opposite of David Lynch's version in casting and tone as well as visuals. Read more... )

4) Finally saw the Barbie movie as well. I can see why it did well. Given its remit and likely limitations, I thought it did a good job. It had a clear direction, and it did it well and with both humor and heart. I also quite enjoyed its ending. That said, I think the film itself opened the door to a more incisive critique which it didn't follow. Read more... )

5) This past month is turning out to be an expensive one. My partner's sister had a roof leak in her spare bedroom, which went on long enough that it damaged the bed underneath it before she noticed. Since this was where my partner stays when he visits his family, a replacement was needed. So we decided to move his current bed there and get a new one. Read more... )

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Happy Solstice

Jun. 21st, 2025 11:36 am
elisi: Snoopy w/Keffiyeh (Free Palestine)
[personal profile] elisi
I give you Lara Fabian and Dimash performing 'Adagio' live at the Wembley arena in London, 03/06/2025:



(This is from Lara's concert, Dimash was a guest. Longer version here including Lara's introduction of Dimash and their interactions after finishing the song. Also - mostly for myself - here is Mansur's video. He's Dimash's younger brother and accompanied him on the trip.)

~

And from The Good Law Project: Pick a side – hate or Pride. "We’re teaming up with Stop Funding Hate to tell these companies to drop GB News. This Pride, let’s make support really mean something."

~

And finally: Click this video to be the reason +700 families in Gaza received water🥹🇵🇸
Many good links in the description.

Don't Sweat Air Conditioner Problems

Jun. 20th, 2025 09:30 pm
ozma914: (Dorothy and the Wizard)
[personal profile] ozma914

I'm rerunning my blog about hot weather from several years ago because, honestly, it's too hot to write.

  

We had an unusually cool spring, but we noticed a problem during the first heat wave of the year: Our big window air conditioner blew air just fine, but that air wasn't conditioned.

I don't know when the problem actually begun. These things are always found at the worst possible time, like when your furnace breaks down during a blizzard, or your sewer backs up during colonoscopy prep.

And I can't complain, because the air conditioner came with the house--which I bought 35 years ago. In fact, we did an internet search for the model, Sears Coldspot, and learned they stopped making it in the 70s. Our air conditioner survived over forty Indiana summers, and that's remarkable.

I was still in my teens when that thing was made! I wish I'd held up nearly as well.
 

 
One final indignity: The box for the new air conditioner ended up on the old air conditioner.


My house doesn't have central air, or central anything. I suppose we could pump cold water through the hot water radiators and cool the house that way, but ... say, maybe that's something to try. Although the furnace is also over forty years old, so best leave well enough alone.

The air conditioner was set into a window, at one corner of the house, but the thing was huge. It was powerful enough to cool the entire downstairs, as long as you set up three fans to blow the air from room to room, in a windy circle that ended with the kitchen air being pumped right back to the conditioner. If you set it up just right, walking through a room can feel like being Jim Cantore reporting for The Weather Channel.

The upstairs is on its own. We bought a small unit for the bedroom, and left the smaller room upstairs to swelter in the summer. In the winter, the smaller room is used as a backup fridge. Old house problems.

When the downstairs air conditioner, which had its own electrical shutoff and a special plug, stopped cooling the house, Emily went outside and laid her hand against the side of it. Then she came back inside and placed her hand in a stream of cold water until the burning stopped.

 
At least a fire would have taken care of that ugly wallpaper.


Yes, there was definitely something wrong, of the "play Taps at its grave" variety.

Anyone who knows my history will not be surprised to learn I saved up for the next big home repair job. After that, it was a simple process of taking the old air conditioner out and replacing it.

It's usually when the word "simple" appears that we run into trouble.

The old unit had been permanently installed in that #@%& window. It had been screwed, hammered, molded, glued, foam-sprayed, and caulked into place. It was as if in addition to stopping air leaks, they wanted to stop burglaries, alien invasions, and Godzilla.

Eventually we freed it, using two screwdrivers, a hammer, chisel, crowbar, power saw, and two sticks of dynamite. (Luckily it was close enough to Independence Day that nobody noticed the noise.) Preparing to install the new air conditioner, I tried to raise the window further.

The window wouldn't raise. It wouldn't raise because it had been installed at the same time as the air conditioner, and was fitted to its exact specifications.

The new unit did not, of course, meet those specifications. But you knew that.

 
That wrapping on top of the new air conditioner contains ... a remote control. Unless both my legs are broken, I have no idea when I'd use it.


Keep in mind that Emily and I were doing this work on a day when the temperature was 88 degrees (at 6 p.m.) and the humidity was 107%. How this is possible I don't know, but after an hour we looked like we'd stepped into a shower fully clothed. Oddly enough, the dog didn't seem at all bothered by this--if anything, he seemed happy to have a new window to look out of.

When we finished, I left the pried out metal, the hunks of insulation and piles of screws, the broken drill bits, right where they fell, and simply taped over the areas the new unit didn't cover. Then I tried to plug it in.

Which wouldn't work. The new unit didn't have a special plug.

Some things you should check first. Luckily, there was a more normal plug a few feet on the other side; we turned the new unit on and went out to get a pizza while it was working.

No way were we cooking inside that house. I mean, any more than we already had.


·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf



Remember, read with the fan in front of you, so the pages don't blow away.

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