Srebrna, Skald Arkadii

Have you ever felt like the only thing that would help is a pair of googly eyes glued to a random object? I have found a pack of them in a drawer and now I'm looking for a good candidate to stick them on.

Interface designers who create pages and apps that part-load and then have loaded elements MOVE AROUND, should be taken out to a market square and flogged until they promise to never, ever, ever, design UI again.

Cassandra (Kasandra)
text Jacek Kaczmarski
translation: Own (with input from @blotosmetek@circumstances.run )

Nothing ends with a simple yes or no
And no warrior dies without a cause
And so I say: It’s the beginning of an end
And drunken mob is climbing up the city walls
For empty are the ramparts of barbarians

Beware the triumph – it’s a trap of Fate
And the enemy tributes lack meaning
Same fire burns in all the pyres
Dumb grunt wields double-edged sword

I don’t forbid you the happiness
No omens will change your fate
But think about your own weakness
Instead of your triumph over people

Terrible celebration just before demise!
Happy the city under Priam’s rule—
Squares, temples, frescoes and poems
Will crumble under a muddy Achaean boot
Your children’s blindness opens all the gates

Like ants, a wave is rolling down the field
To where the Red Horse stands unmoved
Ah, to be one of them, like them
Ah, such a heavy burden is my knowledge

Play and drink now, children,
As much as you still are able to
There are people ready for death
Brought on by people not yet ready for life

I got hit with an essay on YT claiming, among other things, that people these days write long form texts already mentally preparing for AI summarisers to be involved, so they adjust language to that aim.
And then the speaker made a claim that everyone these days has this reflex - that when they receive a longer e-mail, it's tempting to dump it into AI for a summary.
Well... Everyone? I get it, younger kids apparently do (I got reports of people asking AI for a summary of my short story), but grownups? Serious 40+ professionals? Do they? Do we?
I don't. And I will never, ever in my life write a piece of text taking LLM or anything of the kind into account. Smarter or dumber type, neither would force me to either change my style, wording, formatting, phrasing and usage of either slang, vulgarity, idioms or dumb popculture references.
Die, vile machines. Eat my crappy, human-typed, organic writing and choke on it. I will not adjust to the mechanical eyes of the automated reader.

April starts shaping up as a month of some refreshing activities.

I want to set up Linux on my laptop (and possibly also on my OLD laptop, because I have a Dell Latitude gathering dust in my desk, with Windows XP on it... why not try to make it usable for something new?) but also to reanimate my old desktop PC with some new system. The old one is... OLD. I mean, when we fired it up it made some very angry comments about the state of the disk and then said the last fsck was done 3500+ days ago.
Oups.
(yeah, it was just standing therte, ignored in favour of the laptop, but time to call it back to service)

Now, in a household of Debians, what would be the MOST, but absolutely MOST obnioxiously annoying distro to install? (please, no PLD)

I'm also making myself a plan/calendar of craft projects to finish, as I've dug up a box full of WIPs that deserve some love. So, blanket crochet time.

And all of this will take a break for 4 days, as we travel away from civilisation with several friends for a prolonged weekend of writing, drinking, dog walking and workshopping our novels.

A full month in front of me :)

Day 3 of writers retreat. Second successful fireplace-side evening. Writing with friends, editing a lot. Texts slowly growing, and we're brainstorming ideas for each other.
I need to collect questions for an invasive celebrity interview, so I'm just editing slowly while chewing on some options.
#writing #writer #writingfantasy

While I understand "garden variety" - something common, cheap, easily available, like a weed in the garden - where does "bog standard" come from? Do bogs have standards? What standards are there in the bogs? Do bogs have a body that oversees the standards? Are there bog auditors that check compliance with standards? What would a bog audit look like?

What are shows, movies, or even particular scenes you'd like to delete from your memory, just to relive the first watch thrill again?

Mine:
Much Ado About Nothing (mainly the opening sequence)
Eurovision 1994 (mainly the intermission show)
Doctor Who episodes: School Reunion, Day of the Doctor, The Power of Three

(virtual cookies for whoever guesses the specific quotes that made me go "THE WHAT?")