Boston

Oct. 28th, 2025 08:18 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
I love Boston so much, especially this area around Harvard. The trees are rich with color, the air is brisk, requiring all my layers of flimsy California-wear, and the sidewalks brick with lumps of tree roots. I love it all.

Yesterday I went with Nine to the Mapparium on the other side of the river. (The bus ride down Massachusetts Ave is great for scenery!) If you've never heard of it--I hadn't until one of the Viable Paradise workshop writers clued me in--it's an enormous glass globe that you can walk into, to see the entire world, worked in jewel-toned glass, as it was in 1935. It was constructed to be a reminder that we are all in this world together; a needed warning then, as now. (Naturally those who need it most won't see or hear.)

We had a great time looking, then testing the amazing sounds created by voices enclosed in glass.

Afterward we met up with Rushthatspeaks for tea and chocolate at L.A. Burdicks. Oh, they know how to do chocolate so, so right. Delish. We chatted and reminisced and cackled like maniacs. Today we'll visit the Fogg to see a Botticelli that is usually hidden in a private collection. I can hardly wait!

I'm coming down from the high of a very successful workshop, and a month of splendid visiting and seeing and fast-lane busy. The workshop writers are so talented and so focused, and all this in beautiful Martha's Vineyard.

Tomorrow homeward bound!

Seven Deadly Sins of Reading

Oct. 26th, 2025 08:36 pm
naraht: Moonrise over Earth (Default)
[personal profile] naraht
Via [personal profile] foxmoth, this is a brilliant meme but also a challenging one! With a certain degree of "oh well, I guess that one does fit..."

Lust, books I want to read for their cover:
- Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere (OK I have read it but I would have picked it up just for the cover, UK edn)
- Andrew Porter, The Imagined Life
- Benjamin Wood, Seascraper

Pride, challenging books I've finished:
- Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
- Laszlo Krasnahorkai, War and War
- JRR Tolkien, Hobbitinn (The Hobbit in Icelandic)

Gluttony, books I've read more than once:
- Alaistair Reynolds, Redemption Ark
- Sergei and Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra
- Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (I like reading this on airplanes, God help me)

Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest:
- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite
- Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Greed, books I own multiple editions of:
- Mary Renault, Return to Night
- (...plus various books in multiple languages but I think that's the only one with multiple editions in English)

Wrath, books I despised:
- RF Huang, Babel
- Don DeLillo, Underworld (I want so much to like this but I don't)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Envy, books I want to live in:
- My own

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Flashing by . . .

Oct. 18th, 2025 07:57 pm
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
Viable Paradise is about to begin, which means hunkering in the bunker.

But today the weather was perfect for the protest gathering at a very busy five-points intersection here on Martha's Vineyard, with A LOT of people and some winsomely unique signage. Lots of laughter and horn honking, and although there were two protesters for the current regime, and a couple of cars went by with passengers waving thumbs down, there was no violence whatsoever. Yay! I wish that would be true everywhere.

Interesting patterns in signage; many quotes from the Bible and from the Constitution, and so very many crowned clowns. One frog, one unicorn, and a bee. Many, but not all, were my age or older.

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