larryhammer: Yotsuba Koiwai running, label: "enjoy everything" (enjoy everything)
[personal profile] larryhammer
For my own amusement, I’ve tracked down and played every single Game Boy era golf game I can find: 7 games for Game Boy, 6 for Game Boy Color, and 6 for Game Boy Advance. Yes, the OG GB really had the most. And since I went to all that effort, I went ahead and rated them. Even limited to one-paragraph quick-takes, rating them all makes for a long-ass post, thus the cuts.

Almost all of these use a 3-button-press mechanic for swinging the club, done as one continuous action: press to start the swing, as the power meter rises press to set the power, as the meter falls to zero press to set the accuracy of your shot. This naturally mimics the stages of a physical golf swing, a comparison some games make visually explicit. In most games, you can apply a couple modifiers (I call them “buffs”) to give the shot draw/fade and top-/backspin—it varies whether you set them before or during the shot.

If you want a TL,DR, the last is the best.

Game Boy games )

Game Boy Color games )

Game Boy Advance games )

Not that I ever get obsessive or anything.

---L.

Subject quote from Espresso, Sabrina Carpenter.

Wednesday What I'm...

Aug. 7th, 2025 12:05 pm
reeby10: the lower half of a person laying on grass and reading with the words 'time to escape' and a ripped looking border (reading)
[personal profile] reeby10
On Thursday, whoops...

Reading
  • I started reading You Had Me at Happy Hour by Timothy Janovsky. I'm like halfway through and not really enjoying it, so it's likely to be a DNF. There's just so much therapy speak and the characters are not interesting enough to make up for it.
  • I started reading The Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff (The Dolphin Ring Cycle #2). Feeling kind of meh about it but I also haven't gotten very far. Just not feeling any books at the moment :/
  • I started reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I've seen so much about it online and have been meaning to read it for ages. Trying to decide if I want to jump in with the tasks or wait until after my trip to Texas next week.
  • Ficwise, I'm going hard for VegasPete. Nothing much spectacular so far, but some good fics! Currently I'm reading I Want to Be the Place You Call Home (A VegasPete Omegaverse) by [archiveofourown.org profile] SurelyMeretricious , which is fun, but they've softened their relationship and Vegas in particular a lot, and I'm missing the fuckedupness lol
Watching
  • The roommate and I finished KinnPorsche! So wild! So good! Even more obsessed with Vegas now, as well as his actor, Bible. Definitely my favorite of the Thai BLs we've watched so far :D
  • The roommate wanted some lighter watching, so we watched Fish Upon the Sky, which has the same leads as Never Let Me Go. A very silly, kind of stupid show, but fun.
  • Since we were enjoying those lead actors so much, the roommate and I decided to just finish things off and watch their third show together, We Are. We're about halfway through and it's been very cute!
  • AEW as usual. I'm a bit bored with it at the moment tbh. Except for everything happening with Kyle Fletcher, love him.
Listening
  • I've listened to a couple fanmixes linked in fics I'm reading, nothing particularly interesting.
Writing
  • I wrote a couple of poems. Which doesn't sound like much, and isn't really, but that little bit has already put me over halfway to my wordcount from all of last month. July was rough...

(no subject)

Aug. 7th, 2025 04:48 pm
turps: (cats and coffee)
[personal profile] turps
I picked up my fruit and veggie box this afternoon, and look at the goodies )

I usually pick up from the Re-F-Use café, but this time, with it being a different day, it was a pickup from an address from Durham. It was a quick drive there, but then I stood knocking for ages. Finally messaged the person who runs the collections, and they said to just go down the drive and the boxes were under the car port and I could pick which one I liked the look of. Did that and yeah, there were four boxes to pick from, sheltered nicely out of the sun.

Once I knew what to do, it was so much easier than a café pick up. Now I have an excess of carrots to deal with, and yes, more lemons *g*

chuckwalla

Aug. 7th, 2025 08:35 am
prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (Default)
[personal profile] prettygoodword
chuckwalla (CHUHK-wah-luh) - n., any of five iguanid lizards (genus Sauromalis) of arid the southwestern US and Mexico.


a chuckwalla in hand is worth two under the prickly pear
Thanks, WikiMedia!

The pic being the common chuckwalla, the kind we see around here. They can get a bit bigger, but not as big as many iguanas. This is, I believe, a repeat word, but it fits the theme -- and besides, the name is fun to say aloud. We got the name in 1893 from American Spanish, from either Cahuilla cháxwal (spoken in southern California) or Shoshoni tcaxxwal (spoken throughout the Great Basin), both Uto-Aztecan languages. [Sidebar: the Comanche left the Great Basin for the southern Great Plains soon after acquiring horses in 1705, and while their language is no longer mutually intelligible with Shoshoni, both peoples still consider each other relatives.]

---L.
[syndicated profile] laughing_squid_feed

Posted by Lori Dorn

Chill Dude Explains dove into a list of eight different historical myths that were eventually proven to be true through science and a little curiosity.

Historical Myths That Were Finally Proven True

The list includes gorillas, ball lightning, the biblical Hittite Empire, rogue waves, Norse sagas, meteorites, Amazons, and the existence of Troy.

Historical Myths That Were Proven True

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The post Historical Myths That Were Eventually Proven True was originally published on Laughing Squid.

Thursday DE

Aug. 7th, 2025 08:18 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Who is a character you've thought of playing but never ended up playing? Was there a reason you never tried or decided against the character?

Bees, More Bees (Also, D'uh)

Aug. 7th, 2025 09:47 am
lydamorehouse: (Default)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 bee hovering near flower
Today's bee, captured in flight.

16;9, y'all. It's just landscape instead of portrait. MAN, I feel dumb. But, I don't feel as though any of my previous bee photos are wasted. I can also submit photos to the New York Times Spelling Bee that are square. So, I should be able to do some editing and send them again! (They are gonna love me, there. OTHO, I'm sure they get a lot of dummies like me!)

I found a resource rich (as in chock full of bees) area that is part of my daily routine. The Minnesota Historical Society! They have a huge pollenator garden on their hillside and yesterday it was literally buzzing with activity. 

 Meanwhile, Jas has proved themselves to be an excellent house guest. Their family recently had to trip to Japan (and Taiwan, where Jas has a grandmother,) and they brought us lots of absolutely PERFECT gifts. Shawn loves konpeitou--the Japanese hard candy that looks like little sandburs. Not only did Jas bring a package of the actual sweets for her, but ALSO earrings that are in the shape of konpeitou!  This is especially wonderful because Shawn (who has otherwise very little interest in all of my Japanese stuff) likes the idea of saying "Ganbetta" (do your best!) but can never remember it, so often tells me, "Konpeitou!" when she means to wish me good luck. So konpeitou has been our silly way of wishing each other good luck. 

For me, Jas brought some fun washi tape and post-it notes. Again, perfect for me, if you know my love of letter writing, etc. 

Then, apparently, their mother also just sent along a whole bunch of odds and ends as gifts, too. We're going to have to step up our game? I have not participated in this competative gift giving thing before. Is it a Southern thing? (Jas's folks live in Oklahoma.) I ask because Mason's other friend Gray, also has parents who send Mason home with odd gifts (they're in Missouri.) Thoughts, any Southern State living friends of mine?

Today, I am planning on letting them have the car to do with as they like. Mason loves Saint Paul (and Minneapolis) and delights in showing off all the cool features found therein. I know they are planning on seeing Minnehaha Falls because that is a tourist MUST (and also Mason loves eating at Sea Salt.) Yesterday, they walked to the Creamery formerly known as Izzy's now... somthing else, which I have forgotten. So, Jas is getting the full tour!  

I shall end with a slightly different bug. If anyone on my list of friends is bug-averse, please let me know and I will put these photos under the cut!

grasshopper on lily
Image: grasshopper on bright red lily (in Grantsville, WI. We stopped at an old-fashioned rootbeer stand type place that had these amazing flowers and I spotted this little fellow.)

Silo: Season 1 Review

Aug. 7th, 2025 04:29 pm
selenak: (Visionless - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
Since because of Foundation I'm currently watching Apple plus again, I also marathoned the first season of Silo, which I didn't have the chance to do last time I watched Apple. In the meantime, I had watched the series Paradise over a the Mouse Streaming Service, and in reviews, comparisons to Silo had been made, which enhanced my curiosity. (Now that I've seen the first seson, I know why, though I would say the shows are far more different than similar, even the resoective premises. At best, you have some parallels in some of the conditions and in one of the results. Which is why I still think it was a mistake to not conclude Paradise (which had a good season, don't get me wrong, but I think the quintessential core story is told within it) as opposed to giving it another season, whereas I look forward to Silo's second season (because while the first one has a concluded main story arc, it is very much written as the start of a larger story).

Spoilers don't know who built the Silo, or why )

💔

Aug. 7th, 2025 06:24 pm
adore: (princess of cups)
[personal profile] adore
I recently found out about a long-running (since 2022) case of plagiarism in what news outlets are calling romantasy but is actually the paranormal romance sphere. It's been occupying me mentally and emotionally all day. Lynne Freeman's novel, Blue Moon Rising, 'died on submission' (I hate that industry phrasing). Ten years later she found a book in bookstores, Crave by Tracy Wolff, worked on by the same agent who had worked with Lynne, submitted to one of the publishing houses (Entangled Publishing) Lynne's book had been submitted to. It had basically copied her unpublished manuscript from top to bottom. I read the New Yorker article by Katy Waldman about the case (internet archive link) but the best source for information on it is Lynne's website.

I read the similarities documents and I cried. I have encountered ruthless, mercenary people in the book business, but this is on another level of evil. My thoughts are under a cut, since I am neither concise nor polite.
Read more... )

Katy Waldman didn't say, in her New Yorker article, whether (after reading both books) she thought that Lynne Freeman's book had been stolen by them. Journalists can't put their personal opinion in as much, etc. But she later appeared on a podcast episode of the Write About Now podcast. And when the host asked her, she said that in her personal opinion, it was theft.

The way she describes Lynne's novel in her New Yorker piece rends my heart further.
Freeman’s manuscript is quieter, more internal. Unlike Wolff, she always knew that fantasy was her genre. She’d immersed herself in Tolkien growing up, and she used to imagine that the people walking around Anchorage were deer shifters or veela, long-haired maidens who called down storms from the sky. She wanted her novel to be as awash in mysterious possibility as her adolescence had been. Her book’s posture toward the natural world is one of respectful awe; reading it, you sense a deeply ingrained isolation.
[...]
Wolff’s story is sassy, fun, commercial, and hot. Freeman’s is raw, ruminative, interior, and possibly unsalable, given the murky volatility of the family dynamics and the protagonist’s wariness, bordering on hostility, toward other women. What is strange and spiky in one is palatable and familiar in the other. Freeman strews esoteric asides about Egyptian mythology, Captain Cook, and the passage of Celtic artifacts from New Zealand to Alaska, which have no counterpart in the “Crave” series. (Instead, there are the singer-songwriter Niall Horan, Restoration Hardware catalogues, “Final Destination.”) The mysticism that pervades “Blue Moon Rising” is muted in Wolff’s novels. The sense of phantasmagoria and unreality is gone.


In the podcast episode, Katy allowed herself to say more.
The way that the Crave novels got produced, like in a couple of months, like that felt very kind of sinister and also stupid. And I wish I had like a better critical language in which to say it, but like reading the Crave novels, they're not good books. They're not well written. They're not well thought through, and they're mean-spirited. And I just didn't find much to recommend them. I could see why people would buy them because they sort of scratch a certain itch in some ways[...] and it was very striking to me that like, if Lynne Freeman and Tracy Wolff had written the same story-ish, the same sort of blueprint of a story, one was a very kind of personal inward-looking creation, and the other was kind of commercialised slop. And that sounds like pretty vicious, but I really did leave the piece with a lot of dismay about the types of kind of book-flavoured products that some of these publishing companies are putting out.


The way she described Blue Moon Rising makes me wish I could read it. And when she described it as strange and possibly unsalable, I felt that. Because I tried for a few years to sell my debut novel (DW link) as YA, and it didn't sell. It sold as a literary-leaning coming-of-age fantasy, to a small press publishing lit fic and weird books. It's a book that's very personal to me. I wrote it to escape to this imaginary world, to make it vivid to myself, and it was, and it was also filtered through this fevered, obsessive protagonist who was on a journey similar to mine... when I imagine what happened to Lynne happening to me, I think it's unbearable.

How can one writer do this to another? How can an agent, an editor, people who live and breathe books do this to a writer? What the actual fuck?

call RFK Jr. about vaccine access

Aug. 7th, 2025 09:27 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
If anyone wants to call RFK Jr. to complain about him not funding vaccines, the phone number is 202-690-7000. I called during office hours (8:30-5 Eastern time) and got voicemail. The message asked for a phone number, and claimed someone would call me back.

If anyone wants a script, my message was:

My name is Vicki Rosenzweig. I’m calling from Boston, to demand that the secretary restore funding for MRNA vaccines. He must make the fall covid and flu boosters available to everyone. I’m immune-compromised, and my safety depends on my family being vaccinated and not giving me a virus. My phone number is [your number here]

Edit as appropriate.
linaewen: Girl Writing (Girl Writing)
[personal profile] linaewen posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello on Thursday! (Sorry for missing yesterday!) How are things going in the world of fic?

Did you write?

   - Yes!
   - No!
   - Not yet!

If yes, what kind of writerly activity did you engage in?  How do you feel about it?
If no, what were the obstacles/situations that affected your writerly pursuits?  What will you do differently tomorrow to get more writing done?
If not yet, because the day hasn't gotten going yet, what kind of writing activity are you planning (or hoping) to accomplish?

I Crave Gay Violence

Aug. 7th, 2025 09:09 am
rynling: (Default)
[personal profile] rynling
"The fact that this character is of indeterminate gender is irrelevant to the story," the copy editor wrote. "You may want to consider deleting this description."

"On the contrary," I absolutely did not reply, "the cursed Gothic manor being casually inhabited by nonbinary staff and artists isn't hurting anyone, and moreover it's a special treat to me, the nonbinary person writing the story."

Then I did not reach through the computer screen to crush the copy editor's fingers with a hammer.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Climate change provides a tribal leader a pretext to dispatch his least favourite tribe members on an ill-fated expedition from which none will return.


The Integral Trees (Integral Trees, volume 1) by Larry Niven
yhlee: (hxx geese 1)
[personal profile] yhlee


...this video is age-locked (18+) because I'm the asshole goose who used too many cuss words. But also, discussion of Game of Thrones, Foundation, etc with spoilers.

(A friend requested this and apparently I am INFINITELY interested in discussing big space battles and things go asplode.)

P.S. Aggro Goose is taking topic requests, especially around narrative in any medium. Leave a comment or email me! (yoon@yoonhalee.com)

(My real agenda is not what you'd think. I need to practice audio cleaning, including de-essers and de-plosives. Now you know!)

Re: Eddington

Aug. 7th, 2025 06:46 am
rynling: (Gators)
[personal profile] rynling
I know Eddington is supposed to be a satire, but I want to talk more about why it didn't work for me.

Read more... )

I think I'm also starting to get the sense that maybe Ari Aster doesn't like women. What can you do.

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delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)Delphi (they/them)

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