jadislefeu | Reading

I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why:

2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat. Ada Palmer [DwarkeshPatel YT]: "Why Medieval Books Cost as Much as a House" (1 min, 7 sec):

Watch on YouTube

Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book hand written costs as much as a house.

And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris, the library from Europe's perspective, has 600 books.

There's definitely more than 600 books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing.

And at the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books.* There are libraries in China with thousands of books. Because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus.

Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.

* Three hundred thousand. It's been thirteen years and I am still not remotely over that fact. Every time I encounter it anew, my SCA persona gets acrophobic trying to imagine a library that big and has to sit down and put her head between her knees so she doesn't pass out.

siderea

The previously expected ICE enforcement surge never materialized. Curious.

I wonder if this just means they're short-staffed. Or perhaps distracted.

(I also wonder if somebody made a judgment call not to try what they did in MN in MA, but have largely rejected the notion. It would not be to anybody's advantage if they did, on either side, but I'm not seeing a lot of good judgment in evidence anywhere.)

lb_lee

Winner of the 2026 fan poll! All text under this is text-only transcription of the comic.

( No Sneaks were involved in this sneak attack. )

Current Mood: happy
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/23710.html

jesse_the_k

From that reliable source of journal prompts, thefridayfive

1) What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

Volunteered for WisCon in 2007, clearly LJ was where everything was Happening. Took me a year to figure out the culture. Moved to DW on 1 May 2009.

2) How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

79! Most are evidently dormant. (DW comms never die.)

3) Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

I love the questions and answers at little_details, where writers seek specifics about an infinite assortment of facts: paint manufacturing, historical Chinese tornadoes, NZ slang for three examples.

4) How did you pick your user name?

It’s a riff on my wallet name which I’ve been using it since 2001.

5) If you could change your user name, would you?

Nope.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3222/

It's ok, I still have some nice, cool gas clouds that aren't collapsing. As long as nothing ionizes them, I can continue to enjoy their ... HEY! NO!!!

https://xkcd.com/3222/

cupcake_goth

Work yesterday left me incredibly frustrated. The ducks that are nibbling me to death have mutated to giant size and with razor-sharp beaks. Because I was so frustrated, I decided I needed to reread one of the most disturbing sets of Hannibal AU fics I've ever encountered: A Gifted Student and A Letter to My Abuser. They're gorgeously, awfully written. (If you decide to read them, pay close attention to the tags oh god pay close attention to them.)

A Letter to My Abuser is, in some ways, the harder read for me, because when I first read it I tried to figure out why I identified so hard with a side character; Ollie, so giddy to meet his literary idol, but forcibly warned/ran off by this AU version of Will Graham. When I read it last night, my brain went "ohhhhh, yeah, Neil Gaiman", and then I had to read some fluffy fic to scrub my brain.

I hope his victims get closure. And that they win the legal actions against him, because they deserve the money they're suing for.

---

EDITED TO ADD: I used to subscribe to FKAHerSweetness' Ko-Fi, as she left Ao3 and only posted her fic behind a paywall. I eventually ended my subscription because as time went on, I didn't enjoy how she wrote Will. She writes AUs only, and more power to her, but they became something I didn't want to read.

lb_lee

We keep a little stack of books we're reading on the kitchen table and our roommates noticed that the spines lined up in amusing ways. This was accidental, but then we thought, "what if we did that... ON PURPOSE?"

And today, we trashed our room stacking books to make poems. We hope they amuse you!

( Seven book poems! )

Current Mood: creative
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/23459.html

siderea

Just hit play.

(All about the sound, but visuals also nice.)

2026 Mar 18: Benn Jordan [BennJordan YT]: "I'm here to disrupt the finance synthesizer scene."

Watch on YouTube

siderea

Screenshot of two comments on X. One says, "Reading Dune. Frank Herbert was cooking." and shows a section of a photo of a book page reading, "'Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.' '"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,"' Paul quoted." Below that someone replied, paging Grok, X's resident AI, "please explain this post and the quote in in, what should I understand about it?"

Debate is raging on BSky if this is deliberate wit or accidental idiocy.

(h/t user mlyp.bsky.social)

lb_lee

Finally finishing the Reverend Alpert book, which has been stalled at around 80% completion for YEARS now
Expanding Quick'n'Dirty Plural History into a proper paperback, because the zine sells shockingly well for such a niche subject, we have a lot more info now (though not on the newest slapfights, ha, no, we're talking older, cross-cultural stuff, and spirit marriage/headmate relationship stuff) (if you want us to wade into the hottest new plural communities on Discord or Bsky or what the fuck ever, you're going to have to pay us real money, and in ADVANCE)
Finally kicking Rogan's ass into inking Loyal Forever, a comic that involves the muscle car beloved from Crazy Boys Get Money)
Expanding Xenogals into a book-length thing, the Mori and Rawlin version of Alter Boys In Love (Xenogals in Love?)

Oh no, all but Loyal Forever are big beefy books. But well, the Xenogals and Plural History ones would replace their floppies, and Reverend Alpert would probably end up a short run anyway.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/23274.html

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

Blood over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang. I'm a sucker for technology-infused magic, and I really liked the sort of computer-programming-magic here; in general the worldbuilding reminded me a bit of the TV show Arcane, which of course has its "magitech", but the main similarity is the elite vs the underclass (who they exploit), and the dark truths behind the marvels of the city. However, the characters are one-dimensional, with stereotypical views that either clearly cast them as the villains or that make it obvious the narrative will be about their realizations that change their views. I will say, though, that I was (pleasantly) surprised by the ending, as I applaud the writer for choosing the more realistic and interesting path over what you might expect from YA.

Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by Leah Litman, who is a law professor and co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, which I've never listened to, but I have heard her on NPR and other people's podcasts. I agree with her main thesis, that the Court has gone off the rails by picking and choosing their "legal principles" by whether or not they agree (ideologically) with the outcome that will result, which frankly stinks. It's well-researched, with lots of cites and notes. However, each of the five chapters is presented using the conceit of a particular show or movie, and as I was only familiar with most of them through osmosis, this didn't really work for me and sometimes seemed overly pop-culture-cutesy. (Like, Barbie - the movie, not the toy - is used as the lens to examine overturning Roe vs. Wade; Game of Thrones tells us that Winter Is Coming For Voting Rights; Mean Girls don't want to sit with LGBTQ people.) For an old Gen-X-er like me it seems like unnecessary metaphor, but maybe it will land better with people who want more glitz and meme in their nonfiction...but in that case, maybe a relatively dense book about law is not what they will be reading? I also will gripe about the editing, which seems particularly poor in the last chapter where Litman misspelled Ronald Reagan's surname and gave the same Neil Gorsuch quote twice within a few paragraphs.

cupcake_goth

(Thank you FOB/Pete Wentz for always providing entertaining song lyrics.)

Everything is ugh. My back is having one of its stretches of hurting and feeling fragile, so my life involves lidocaine patches and dipping into the stash of muscle relaxers and heavy-duty pain meds. I've been having an upswing in different types of migraines, and I suspect the main culprits are weather and stress. All I want to do is sleep, and my mood can generally be described by that Charles Darwin quote of "I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything". With a large side of "meh". I really want a doctor to prescribe the historical treatment of going to the seaside for a week (with the appropriate servants to take care of me and bring me dainty treats while I sit with my feet in the ocean).

Today is particularly ugh, as we lost three writers yesterday and I need to cover their work while we hire new writers for those positions. (Yeah, read between the lines there and you can probably guess what happened.) Thankfully, I talked to my boss and asked how this would work with my current projects, and she told me that my number one priority right now is to focus on the writing/being a writer, and once those positions are backfilled, I'll go back to my Program Manager work. So at least I don't have to worry that I'm being held to two sets of different standards. But still, stressful.

Meh.

---

One thing that's been entertaining me is going through my Tumblr archives - prompted by a post going around asking people how long they've been on Tumblr oh my god 2010 really?! - and finding a lot of fun content and a lot of pink & black eye candy. But I realized (a bit too late) that I shouldn't read my text posts from 2011, because that was the worst year of my life. Dear Powers That Be, that isn't an invitation to go "hold my beer!" and try to overshoot that. I don't need that.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3221/

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

https://xkcd.com/3221/

lb_lee

Mori: nobody jumps out of bed going, “Good morning world, today I do my TAXES!” with a big smile on their face, but man alive, is it neat to see what sold and what didn’t, when and where.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/22940.html

lb_lee

Mori: Heads up y'all, I'm doing our tax prep, which means I'm going through all our titles, seeing what sold and what didn't, and deciding what gets weeded. In a week or so, I'm going to be removing the following ebook listings from sale, so if you want them, now is the time to get them:

The Homeless Year (sells great on paper still, that'll stay)
Alter Boys in Love
Coming In Or Staying Out (also sells great on paper still, will stay on paper)

(Rogan's Aphasia is also barely hanging in there, has been for years; for some reason every once in a while people will buy another copy of it, just BARELY keeping it in the running.)

(Also I figure, just as a note, we do this every year. I tally up everything what sold, and shit that sold less than five copies gets weeded. I'm trying to get us more regular about saying when we're removing something from print, since some folks might miss out otherwise. And hey, if enough copies sell, it'll stay up for other folks!)

Current Mood: working
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/22657.html

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3220/

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

https://xkcd.com/3220/

jesse_the_k

While he was quite surprised to walk out for his morning on-leash ablutions into heavy snow above his knees, he's really starting to relax.

This morning I reached down to stroke his back and he didn't flinch.

Just now I was resting on the floor by his bed, petting his back. I started to scritch the scruff of his neck, and he relaxed even more, his dark eyes shining up at MyGuy behind the camera. (I'm reclining on my tripled-up exercise pad just behind him, shockingly without glasses.)

( Read more... )

Only 28 days of enforced rest to go!

lb_lee

This is a messy post about death and love.

( content warning: abuse. )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/22277.html

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

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.

umadoshi

I have worked. Uh. A lot. Over the past three weeks. o_o But now it's the weekend, and I don't currently have a rewrite to work on, and March Break lies ahead; the spring crunch isn't finished, but it's on hiatus for the week, and a normal workweek is a breath of fresh air at this point. (Also I'm taking a couple of days off during it.)

Yesterday work wrapped up early enough that I had an actual evening, so I was finally able to start Butterfly Effects, the fifteenth (!) InCryptid book. ("Finally" is a bit of a stretch, I guess, since it's still the release week, but this is a Sarah-narrated book. Mostly. SARAH.)

So my hopes for the weekend are pretty much: avoid napping (I don't find naps restorative and feel groggier after than before I started); finish reading Butterfly Effects; watch this week's The Pitt and hopefully the temporarily-streaming production of The Importance of Being Earnest with

scruloose; get

scruloose to redo my undercut; and (also with

scruloose) do a second round of advance-prepping ten or so bags of the dry ingredients for my breakfast banana bread while also baking up a new batch of loaves. I think that last will also require decanting cinnamons from bags into jars, so maybe we'll manage a bit of other spice decanting/sorting while we're at it.

Current Mood: groggy

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June 2024

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Page Summary

siderea - The cost of literacy [medieval hist]
siderea - Massachusetts not the next? [Ω, MA/US]
lb_lee - Comic: Sneak Attack!
jesse_the_k - The Friday Five: Journal History
xkcd_feed - Star Formation
cupcake_goth - (no subject)
lb_lee - Book Spine Poetry
siderea - Benn Jordan plays the stock market [econ, tech, dataviz, music]
siderea - Grok, explain Butlerian Jihad [ai]
lb_lee - Potential Future Projects We're Kicking Around
isis - wednesday reads
cupcake_goth - I'm like a diamond on the inside / just add the pressure
xkcd_feed - Landscape Features
lb_lee - Books and Bytes
lb_lee - Last Chance for Ebooks; get 'em before they're GONE!
xkcd_feed - Rotational Gravity
jesse_the_k - Day 21: Shadow Continues to Mellow
lb_lee - The Secret Legion
mark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance today
umadoshi - A scattered weekly proof of life

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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Page generated Mar. 22nd, 2026 01:55 am

Rosebriars and ink

Reading

The cost of literacy [medieval hist]

Massachusetts not the next? [Ω, MA/US]

Comic: Sneak Attack!

The Friday Five: Journal History

Star Formation

(no subject)

Book Spine Poetry

Benn Jordan plays the stock market [econ, tech, dataviz, music]

Grok, explain Butlerian Jihad [ai]

Potential Future Projects We're Kicking Around

wednesday reads

I'm like a diamond on the inside / just add the pressure

Landscape Features

Books and Bytes

Last Chance for Ebooks; get 'em before they're GONE!

Rotational Gravity

Day 21: Shadow Continues to Mellow

The Secret Legion

Performing some traffic maintenance today

A scattered weekly proof of life

Profile

June 2024

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags