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Current Music: Molly Donnery & The Ciderhouse Rebellion, "The Town of Ballybay"

He tried to run away, well, she hit him with a hammer

For Saint Patrick's Day, I had a foreign body removed from my eye and was immunologically shot in the shoulder. Who needs booze?

Current Music: Jack Johnson, "Better Together"

There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard

The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

Current Music: Dropkick Murphys, "Tessie"

She's got a common full of love

It is the dozenth birthday of Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, lhude sing meaw! We sang to her after midnight. She ate eagerly of her festive ham. She has spent the afternoon in the pursuit of Bird Theater. I remember her brother under that same light. Bast smiled when our cats were born.

Current Music: Avalon Emerson, "Don't Be Seen with Me"

If I were you, I'd be out on the town

Whatever passes for my health these days has tipped over onto the sidewalk, but my afternoon which contained far too much communication with doctors on far too little sleep was measurably improved by the discovery of Avalon Emerson's "Don't Be Seen with Me" (2025). I think of Oppenheimer Analysis as so extremely niche in appeal that it almost never crossed my mind that anyone would cover one of their songs, much less drench it in heart-racing, echo-dragged dream-pop like a night drive high on the endless windshield slide of light. I still prefer the colder, dryer original with its relentlessly weird garbage-can drum programming and glitteringly nervy columns of synths against which the vocals sound even more paranoid and plaintive, but just the fact that someone else went for their own version makes me happy. I suppose electronically unsettled meditations on the Manhattan Project and the Cold War have come back around into fashion.

Current Music: Elliott Smith, "Baby Britain"

Counts the waves that somehow didn't hit her

Not only is 42 °N a lousy latitude for radio astronomy, it does jack most of the year for the photosynthesis of vitamin D, but I was inspired by the summerlike spike in temperatures to walk out for groceries in a T-shirt and whatever it may or may not have done for my metabolism, it was worth the pitching over onto the couch when I got home.

No introduction to an actor may be as misleading as discovering Peter Lorre with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but spending much of last night sacked out in front of my longtime comfort movie of Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) reminded me that I should probably count Richard Attenborough in a similar vein, all those weak links and bad influences his panicking debut in In Which We Serve (1942) and his nihilistic breakout in Brighton Rock (1947) set him up for. Never mind that I saw him first as the briskly competent ringleader of The Great Escape (1963), he looks much more in his ambivalent element as Lew Moran, the middle-aged navigator who may have his moral compass screwed on straightest of the sun-blistered survivors of what will become the Phoenix but little authority between his uneasy position as peacemaker and his diffidence as a drying-out drunk, even if his stammer doesn't after all stop him from going off like a firecracker on some blatantly bullheaded display of stupidity on the part of one or more of his co-leads. It would have been the second way I saw him, after which the time-shock of Jurassic Park (1993), jovial and grandfatherly and scientifically short-sighted. I'd give a lot for a record of his Sergeant Trotter in the original run of The Mousetrap. The time machine bureau is going to cut me off.

Current Music: Tegan and Sara, "I'll Be Back Someday"

Sit and watch my TV set

I have been made the unexpected recipient of an unbirthday scarf. It is patterned as if with fossil leaves and irresistibly striped.

Entry tags:

Monday Media Musings: February 2026 highlights

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: I wanted to love this game, but the most I could muster up was an appreciation for its artistry, world-building, and ambition. Too much of the story was left clouded, hidden behind impossible bosses, and character motivations kept opaque to preserve surprises for the audience. ( Massive spoilers behind the cut. )

On top of that, T and I both found the combat difficult in an unsatisfying way, and having to learn not just entirely different skill trees but power-up mechanisms for every character felt unnecessary. Eventually we turned the difficulty level down, which helped, but in the end it felt like we were just slogging through the final battles to get to the ending and be done with it. Disappointing.

Plur1bus: Like many folks, I was eagerly anticipating this one, based on my love for Rhea Seehorn in Better Call Saul, and it lived up to that expectation -- although in other ways I wasn't sure what to expect, and it certainly kept me guessing throughout. It's hard to say much without spoilers, so I'll limit my thoughts here to being just generally impressed by it, and blown away by Seehorn's performance, and also by Karolina Wydra, who played Zosia, a tough role on several levels. Excited to see where it goes!

The 2026 Winter Olympics: Despite all the problems, I do still love the Olympics -- getting to watch and learn about different sports, witness joy and heartbreak and feats of incredible athleticism, following developing storylines and experience the unexpected. I dipped in and out of a lot of events, but I ended up spending the most time on curling. T is a fan -- it's perhaps the only Olympic sport that he'll actively sit down and watch with me -- and because the athletes are all miked, you can hear them discussing strategy with each other, which is really interesting. I also caught some figure skating; in particular, the men's and women's free programs were fascinating case studies in the folly of expectations, and I genuinely loved watching the two gold medal winners put in the performances of their lives.

Current Music: Orla Gartland, "Little Chaos"

Took a left, hit a nerve, took a right, hit the curb

For various reasons not limited to the overhead activity of children in the mornings, last night was the first real time all week that I slept and have thus spent most of the day in a vague state of hibernation despite the warmth of the air. There was a mauve overcast around sunset that turned out to belong to a volcanic wall of gold and bougainvillea over an agate-blue cloud-band. Have some mostly musical links.

For the more than twenty years since

lesser_celery made me a CD of Peter Gabriel's Melt (1980), I have assumed that the eerily voiced French refrain of "Games Without Frontiers" was either the singer's own falsetto or pitch-shifted vocals. It turns out to be Kate Bush. I would never have identified her on my own, but then I thought about "Army Dreamers" (1980).

I grew up on Arlo Guthrie, but my favorite version of "City of New Orleans" (1971) is almost certainly Steve Goodman himself in 1970, where he reminded me unexpectedly of a Chicago-accented Stan Rogers. It's driving me nuts that I would swear the first person I heard lead "The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" (1977) was Pete Seeger and I can't figure out where.

WERS has been playing nothing but female artists for International Women's Day, which means everything from Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" (1978), Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" (1983), and Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" (1993) to Tegan and Sara's "I'll Be Back Someday" (2019), Orla Gartland's "Little Chaos" (2024), and Arlo Parks' "2SIDED" (2026). I had a moral obligation to let my father know when Rickie Lee Jones came around.

Video quality regardless,

sholio's "Waking Up in Vegas" (The Greatest American Hero) remains one of my all-time favorites of their vids.

Current Music: Universal Hall Pass, "Six-Step Dragon"

Keep mending broken lines

For her eightieth birthday observed, we celebrated my mother with a three-tier almond cake layered with marzipan icing and raspberry and rose hip preserves, frosted in rose-toned whipped cream, and decorated with pâtes de fruits into the central one of which was socketed the candle to grow on. It looked like a charlotte russe from the Geometric period in slices. We gave her books, cards, balloons, a banner of cats, a pendant like a bronze-pronged sun of creamy golden sapphire on a leather cord. My niece ran around all day with the twins. I am not ready for Daylight Saving Time. I have enough trouble with the regular kind.

Current Music: PJ Harvey, "Memphis"

In Memphis, on Valentine's Day

Diameter of mental blast crater not diminished. Outside is absurdly springlike following the double-tap of winter that required me to shovel my mother's car out twice, once for the unexpected four inches of snow and then for the glacial swamp the succeeding sleet turned the driveway into. In the process I seem to have inherited the Bat, the stupidest motorcycle jacket I have met in my life. It doesn't have sleeves so much as it has patagia. It is covered with snaps that open into flaps and none of them into pockets. The total design suggests that it may be so heavily constructed because otherwise in a sufficiently stiff gust of wind its owner could achieve accidental unpowered flight. It looks like an opera cape with ambitions of fetish night. My mother insisted on it because I had run out to shovel the first time in my flannel shirtsleeves and the second time my corduroy coat was obviously not adequate to the slush-fall, but it was a present to my father from my grandparents about forty years ago and it looks functionally mint because he has spent most of that time avoiding ever wearing it. In its defense, it is extremely warm and also I look like a tire. There will be no photographs.