primeideal

I live near Washington, DC, which is celebrated for (among many other things) its cherry blossom festival. In the spring, around late March or early April, the cherry trees downtown (donated by the mayor of Tokyo in 1912) burst into bloom and tourists flood the city to enjoy the beautiful trees.

Just around the corner from me, by my train station, there is a gorgeous tree that, around this time of year, puts forth large cupped pink petals, which bloom briefly and then are scattered all over the pavement. I just kind of assumed that this was one of the famous cherry trees, and was smugly like "yeah, I could go downtown to see the little dainty ones, but it's crowded and the one I have here is spectacular."

Okay, well, after an embarrassing amount of time, this weekend I learned: these gentle little whitish-pink flowers are cherry blossoms (specifically, Yoshino). The ones near me are magnolia trees (maybe soulangeana)? I am not really an outdoorsy person.

(The Tidal Basin was very crowded and my dad is a hero for putting up with all the driving/looking for parking spaces. But it was fun. Now I can say that I have officially Done cherry blossom season.)

I've been trying to track down the larger context of some poem excerpts I saw (in translation), and had not been meeting with much success with my various search engines. I mostly use Edge browser, and at some point I thought I'd set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo there, but I was getting weird asides/chatbot regurgitated answers from the Microsoft search engine, so I tried to make sure it was set, and it was not. For anyone needing advice on how to switch their search engine in Edge, here it is:

-Settings
-type "search" in the search bar (very meta)
-Address Bar and Search
-Search Engine Used In The Address Bar

...So I went to type this up the other night, and of course, Edge just hid the "rich text" post box from me on Dreamwidth because it's afraid I'll spill its secrets to everyone. But it works in Chrome! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 Two comments from speculative fic chat with my work buddies that might be worth reposting

( it's politics nonsense )

Exiting the train today and I saw that I was in the "Quiet Car," which had a sign on the wall explaining its purpose. Such rules as "Please be kind; people don't always know that they are on the Quiet Commute Car." The last rule is (italics theirs): "The Quiet Commute Car may be suspended at any time during the trip."

Then beneath that, in much smaller letters: "Remember....if the Quiet Commute Car continues to cause passenger complaints and discord, it will be discontinued."

Remember? Continues? Discord? I have so many questions.

I survived the intimidating (preparation for and actual event of) doctor's appointment. Thanks for all the *hugs*. Still many literal and figurative headaches ahead, I'm sure, but sometimes the dread of not knowing what to expect is the worst and things are back to normal-ish.

I'm such an adult I'm going to knit my taxes now...

I don't usually talk much about my dreams for kind of stupid and silly reasons that I won't get into here. But a couple dream patterns:

• Often, my dreams are set in my childhood, like I'll be in the classroom I had for third and fourth grade. From talking to other people, I think lots of people have an experience of "oh yeah, in my dreams, I'll be in my childhood home even though I haven't lived there in years." Sometimes I recognize that there's something messed-up about this, sometimes not.
• Sometimes, this feeling of messed-up-ness leads to "oh wow, time travel! This would be a great idea for a story!", especially if there's like a false awakening. Usually when I get up for real it's like...I'm not remembering the details very well anyway, and the idea probably wasn't that great.
• Often, when either of my siblings appear in my dreams, I'm at odds with them for some reason. This concerns me, because I wouldn't say we have a bad relationship nor did we as kids! They're tighter with each other than either is with me, but we've never been on bad terms. But my unconscious mind seems to have bad feelings there. :/

So the other night, I dream about my brother, and he's in charge of NASA or something, and I'm working for him. There's this bar graph of "approval ratings he has to get, by year," like a video game challenge or something, increasing over time, and the last couple years it's like "yeah the 'goal' value is lower but the extra challenge is, you have to have a woman astronaut." And his response is basically "...great, I can do this, everybody loves NASA, I'm going to be very popular! And I don't think people will disapprove of having woman astronauts? Is this like a chivalry thing where people are more worried about seeing women in danger? Nah. We got this." And I was like "yess! We do got this, I'm glad to be working for you."

So this was 1. a much better relationship with my brother than I usually have in dreams, and 2. as I was waking up/jumping out of that dream into another one, I did get a story idea that was not about women, bar graphs, or approval ratings, but was about astronauts. Right now it's looking to be a ~800 word flash fic. We'll see.

Courage in situations where it is unwarranted is known as "heroism." Serenity in situations where it is unwarranted is known as "complacency." Corollaries are left as an exercise to the reader.

[Edit from the future: there was a "Laws of the Universe III" posted in 2022, but I locked it to just myself because I'm stealing some of that language/metaphor to put in a project that, if it was ever published, would be under a different name. So the laws are not in numerical order.]

If you're inviting colleagues who you might not know well over to your house, it's well and good to say stuff like "we have a dog" in the e-mail. This kind of generic information may be important to people who are allergic to dogs.

What's even more useful to more people is if you specify whether your dog is old and sedentary, or one of the crazy kind of hyperactive creatures that will jump onto and bark at random strangers as soon as they come inside...

Unsolicited rec: on the way to visit my aunt and uncle I heard this on the radio. Takes the trope about the "World's Smallest Violin" and runs with it. "I can't help myself from feeling bad/I kind of feel like two things can be sad." Oof.

Also. One of the first books I read on the Kindle was "Gideon the Ninth," which is about weird necromantic space nuns and a mysterious competition in an ancient abandoned castle. The Kindle, when it's booting up from rest mode, has a few default images that it rotates through, including fancy typewriter letters. One of them is this. And my reaction was "wow, that sure does look like a bunch of mysterious figures in veils gathered for some nefarious purposes, it must be the cover image for Gideon the Ninth." It was a little strange that none of the other books had those kinds of images, but whatever, some of them are more obscure.

Anyway, a couple days ago, I realized...it's pencaps. Fancy fountain pens, to go along with the writing/reading/typesetting theme. I am very smart!

Tower bells are like cars because I regularly surround myself with people who know how to operate them, whereas I'm going "this is hundreds of pounds of metal and you treat it with the reverence of a loaded weapon that could seriously hurt someone?? you expect me to control this??" and after things inevitably go wrong I freak out which causes me to be even more anxious and inept, and also I look like I'm about fifteen, which I'm not.

I don't know what handbells correspond to. I like handbells.