Ridiculous weekend plans

Jul. 5th, 2025 02:06 pm
fred_mouse: Night sky, bright star, crescent moon (goals)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

I need some down time this weekend. I have any number of things I want to have done, but I'm restricting myself to things that can be done sitting on the bed, minimal movement. To whit:

  1. Finish reading The Dictionary of Lost Words - DONE! Highly recommended fictional account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
  2. Read Attached - book on romantic relationships. in progress (started Saturday)
  3. Finish Creating a Second Brain - collected from the library yesterday, read a chapter on the bus
  4. Finish Library of the Dead - this one is due back on Monday, and being Libby, will get autoreturned.

Which, not actually outside the bounds, as long as I am actually doing those.

stretch goals, of which I'm hoping to achieve at least one

  1. close tabs (current: 526, goal: <500) in safari
  2. finish reading the fic I'm part way through (there might be more than one of these.
  3. progress Eldest's quilt (this is not an 'on the bed' activity; it is added so that if I need to get up and move around, I have a task)
  4. write up my goals for the next 6 months
  5. blog post about how the study is going.

typo du jour

Jul. 3rd, 2025 11:41 am
fred_mouse: screen cap of google translate with pun 'owl you need is love'. (owl)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

..look at the underlying code or moth...

  • me, describing someone else's approach to understanding large language models.

Sunshine Challenge #1

Jul. 2nd, 2025 12:12 pm
pensnest: bright-eyed baby me (Default)
[personal profile] pensnest
There are at least a dozen bee-esque insects bobbing against the perspex roof of the verandah outside my craft room door. I'm not sure if they are confoozled honey bees or... not, but I have never seen such a collection of them in such a place before.

*

Sunshine Challenge Time!

Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-1.png

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

Goals for July

1 Complete UCAS application
2 Communicate with potential new Mosaic members
3 Work on Rainbows song
4 re-think the progress of Dragon in the Woods
5 finish the Gardens of Giverny scarf
6 block the big shawl
7 try to actually post to DW instead of composing things in my head and forgetting them

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.. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


I have been going to a drawing class for the past three weeks—to my chagrin I won't be going today, because last night at about nine pm I was smitten with a vicious sore throat and a miserable nose. Having in consequence had far too little sleep, and being now obnoxious to be around, I won't inflict my woes on anyone else. (It's not Covid, at least not according to the test I took. But yuck.)

Anyway. I'm very pleased with this:




Excuse the dots at the bottom—I 'drew' a polar bear on the other side of the paper!

'Typo' of the day

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:48 pm
fred_mouse: Australian magpie on the handle of a hills hoist; text says 'swoopy chicken' (grumpy)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Today's annoyance with YouTube auto-craption:

"Current university"

Locals, who know what the tiny set of options are, can possibly identify what 'Current' is relatively easily. In my case, given that I was watching this from within Curtin University, it was even easier, once I worked out that that was what is going on.

But oh! it annoys me that people don't review the captions for even that level of obvious mistake (I'm not calling that one egregious. The ones that mess up the name(s) of Country included in an Acknowledgement of Country are egregious. I've never seen the same error for a Welcome to Country, which I assume is because the Indigenous people associated with the production of such know too well how badly it can be messed up).

Goal setting question(s)

Jun. 29th, 2025 09:39 pm
fred_mouse: Night sky, bright star, crescent moon (goals)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Now that I've written up the six month summary of how my 2025 New Year's Resolutions have gone, I'm looking at what I want for the next six months. Which might turn out to be a 12 month set of goals; I'm kind of being flexible with whatever works.

But!

One of my intentions is that I have goals for each of the areas of my life that are important to me--there is no rating of how big that area has to be, just that I see it as an important circle. Two of these I did not manage to get a coherent goal for across the last six months. I'm not sure that it is possible to have coherent goals, but that might be me looking from the wrong perspective.

Which is where my question comes in: what suggestions do people have as to goals for 'Family' and 'Social'? I'm okay with drive by commentary from people who aren't familiar with the limitations of my life, because not knowing those details might be an important part of different perspective.

New Year's Resolutions - close out

Jun. 29th, 2025 06:04 pm
fred_mouse: Night sky, bright star, crescent moon (goals)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Given that the last three weeks have been a completely different pace, and my expectations of my self for the rest of the year are quite different to where I was at the beginning of the year, I'm going to close out the set of goals I set myself at the beginning of the year (Note: I'm not working from that page, but from an offline edited version). The last update I did was May 20th. I contemplated writing a new set of resolutions in this post concurrently with wrapping up these, but have decided instead to create an offline document of Mid-Year Resolutions. I might get around to posting that, but chances are low.

Lots of details, possibly only interesting to me )

tl;dr: great progress for work; good progress on craft, reading, physical - exercise and health; not great on house, organisation, decluttering, writing, garden, learning, money. No goals to compare to for family or social. Having a list continues to be useful.

Signal boost

Jun. 27th, 2025 10:32 pm
fred_mouse: close up on a shelf of books (books)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

[personal profile] thestory inside is doing July signups. I'm not taking on any extra commitments, not even suggested reading, at the moment, but I have very much enjoyed the suggestions I have had from this group. If you have a TBR list you can share, you too can have this excitement in your life!

It works on a buddy system - they pick three books from your list for you to read, you pick three books from their list for them to read. Sign ups close on the 1st July.

Things that make me laugh

Jun. 25th, 2025 11:14 am
fred_mouse: line drawing of sheep coloured in queer flag colours with dream bubble reading 'dreamwidth' (Default)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

in the paper I'm reading right now, I found the sentence

"All these models end up being specific cases of a generalized stochastic differential equation."

and actually laughed out loud (it helps that I'm working from home today; specifically from bed, so that maybe my lower back will stop hating me. I can read just as well in bed, having spent a lot of the last year training to read from the laptop in exactly this position :) And thus laughing is not disruptive)

Why did I laugh? As I explained to [personal profile] artisanat, that is the first jargon filled sentence where I've understood every word and what it means. And then I was asked for examples of words I don't know, which at this point I can think of 'constructivist framework' and 'epistemological' (I'm starting to get a feel for the latter; the former I have zero idea)

ETA: the next sentence read

"We cannot provide a detailed account of these models since they require a certain level of mathematical expertise."

Australian Songs I like

Jun. 24th, 2025 05:36 pm
alias_sqbr: the symbol pi on a pretty background (Default)
[personal profile] alias_sqbr
Local radio station triple J is doing a Hottest 100 of Australian Songs, and I thought it would be fun to make a playlist of Australian songs, in roughly descending order of how much I like them, and then compile my ten votes from there. My actual vote included less white dudes/took into account what was already in the system etc. And I am sure if I made this list on a different day it'd have been different songs!

and we always have a story

Jun. 22nd, 2025 09:18 pm
pensnest: clip of Mucha picture, caption A Very Nice Gel (Very Nice Gel)
[personal profile] pensnest
I was given A Presumption of Death for my birthday. It's the Jill Paton Walsh Lord Peter Wimsey book set in the early years of WWII. It's all right. Mostly it catches the right sort of tone, but there are moments when the vocabulary doesn't seem quite right—would DL Sayers have called a dress 'sexy-looking'? Could do better, I reckon. And the Wimseys seem to be unusually perspicacious about the likely course of the War. I realise that it must be hard to restrict a fictional character's knowledge of what is to come when you are writing in the 21st century, not while the war is actually in progress, but for me, too many hints at the future were irritating.
However. Not bad, for fanfic.

(no subject)

Jun. 22nd, 2025 06:54 pm
fred_mouse: line drawing of a ladybug with love-heart shaped balloons (ladybug)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Between one thing and another, I haven't been keeping up on dreamwidth. I'm spending the next hour or so attempting to clear out - there were 317 tabs open in the dreamwidth window when I started; it will be interesting to see where I get to. So many posts from mid-May I was going to reply to; giving myself permission to abandon. And then I'm going to do the same thing with the backlog of my inbox.

And how do I get to 317 tabs? By every day or two scanning my reading list, and opening everything longer than a paragraph that I expect to want to read. This means I can get 'caught up' over breakfast, even if not everything gets read!

devil in disguise

Jun. 22nd, 2025 10:42 am
pensnest: Dark silhouette opening jacket to reveal rainbow chest (Rainbow Superman)
[personal profile] pensnest
Has anybody been watching the newest season of Daredevil (Born Again)?

cut for spoilers )
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