“Self,” I told myself, as I circled the bookstore display of Asako Yuzuki’s Hooked, “self, you must de-hype yourself. Yes, this is the new book by the author of your beloved Butter, and yes, Yuzuki has teamed up once again with all time favorite translator Polly Barton, but you must not expect to love it as much as Butter! That is too much weight to place on a book!”

And indeed I did not love Hooked as much as Butter, but it’s still a fascinating book and just as propulsively readable, even as it went off the rails a bit at the end.

Hooked begins with our heroine Eriko arriving at work early. She is a successful employee but otherwise struggling in life. She’s thirty years old, still single, keeps getting dumped by her boyfriends, and doesn’t have a single female friend.

This last fact is the one that torments her. She believes (despite the solid counter-evidence of all those dumpings) that she’s good with men, but she’s terrible at female relationships and she knows it. In fact, sometimes she laments that she’s never had a female friend, although once again - solid counter evidence - she keeps running into her old friend Keiko in the apartment halls. But Eriko destroyed that friendship when she was 15, and hasn’t had a friend since.

However, Eriko has achieved a pleasurable parasocial relationship with her favorite blogger, Hallie B, who bills herself as The World’s Worst Wife. She has neither a job nor children, just stays home all day neither cleaning the house nor cooking, just loafing about and occasionally updating her blog.

Oh, and Hallie B seems to have no female friends either. This makes Eriko feel extremely seen.

Then one day, Eriko catches sight of Hallie B having lunch at a local neighborhood spot. She introduces herself as a big fan of the blog, Hallie B introduces herself by her real name Shoko, and they make plans to have dinner at a nearby Denny’s.

Dinner is a blast! They super hit it off! Eriko rides home on the back of Shoko’s bike, like they’re in a high school anime, amazing. Eriko concludes that her friendship problems are OVER because she has now found a BEST FRIEND FOREVER and they are now going to hang out, like, ALL THE TIME.

Shoko thinks they had a nice evening and hopes they can continue to hang out occasionally.

You can see where this is going. Soon Eriko is sending Shoko lengthy strings of texts promising that she is NOT a stalker, and also stalking the Denny’s where they hung out that one time in case Shoko comes back so Eriko can tell Shoko to her face that she is not! not! NOT! stalking her!

Eriko has some of the same energy as Izzy in The Appeal, except somehow simultaneously more deranged and more self-aware. It seems like these two qualities should be contradictory, and indeed there are times when Yuzuki doesn’t get the balance quite right, and instead of seeming fascinatingly, complexly batshit, Eriko just seems incoherent.

( spoilers )

Our planter is here! Getting it wasn't actually a saga, but it felt a bit like one. ( TL;DR: delivery service annoyance )

---

We also both took yesterday off (and I'm off the rest of the week, but got up at my usual workday time today in hopes of getting a fair amount of manga work done), and ventured out to buy veg seeds for the planter. (We also still need to get soil/fertilizer/etc., but want to read up on it more first. I think I might order a hard copy of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, which I got on sale in ebook recently and like so far.)

Yesterday's important lesson: when noting down which seed varieties we like the looks of, include the source, because our local store, at least, has separate displays for each originating company, and knowing that would make it much easier to check for the various varieties. Anyway, here's what we wound up with (descriptions are in my last post):

Basil: Devotion.

Cabbage: Early Golden Acre (green) and Serpentine F1 (savoy).

Spinach: Bloomsdale and Renegade.

Lettuce: Brighton (Butterhead), Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf), Red Salad Bowl (red leaf), Grand Rapids (green leaf), Freckles (romaine), and Drunken Woman.

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/4/16/theres-nothing-like-a-nap-with-your-bestie

Via uso_otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/4/16/theres-nothing-like-a-nap-with-your-bestie

Post-game interview on Facebook for the game against Invicta on Sunday (we lost 10-1). Favourite comment from a friend: "you both pulled such funny faces when the other one was speaking".

My feedback on the Hull camp shared (with permission) on their Facebook page: "I've enjoyed all the camps so far and I think they're good value for money. I think they're helping me improve as a player, and I've definitely seen other players level up in skill and confidence after attending. I'm very much looking forward to three whole days in July. I also really value the friendships I've been building with players from other teams, who I met because of these camps, and the mutual support we've been able to give each other over this past season."

Upcoming: BUIHA will live stream Nationals this weekend on YouTube, my games that will definitely be on it are:

• Sat 15:15 Cambridge Huskies v Leeds Gryphons B
• Sat 18:18 Cambridge Huskies v Nottingham Mavericks C
• Sun 14:20 Birmingham Lions B v Cambridge Huskies
• Sun 19:25 Oxford Women's Blues v Cambridge Huskies

(There's one more group-stage game that will be played on the other ice pad and not streamed, and then depending on how we do in group, we'll be assigned to the semi finals for either Bronze, Silver or Gold finals so we'll have up to two more games on Sunday.)

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/human-trust-of-ai-agents.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71853

Interesting research: “Humans expect rationality and cooperation from LLM opponents in strategic games.”

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of ‘zero’ Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM’s reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects’ behaviour and beliefs about LLM’s play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/human-trust-of-ai-agents.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71853

This year I'm doing Community Thursdays. Some of my activity will involve maintaining communities I run, and my favorites. Some will involve checking my list of subscriptions and posting in lower-traffic ones. Today I have interacted with the following communities...


* "Books" in history

* "Female Leads" in hooked_on_heroines

* "Follow Friday Master Post" in interested_in_that

I found this list interesting:

The Best History Books of 2025: the Wolfson History Prize Shortlist

1 Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough
2 The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor
3 The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge
4 Survivors: the Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Hannah Durkin
5 The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda by Andrew Fleming
6 Multicultural Britain: A People's History by Kieran Connell

Skills That Survived Every Economic Collapse in History

Every economic collapse in recorded history — from Weimar Germany to Argentina's default to Venezuela's currency crisis — followed the same brutal pattern: institutions failed, credentials evaporated, and the most "educated" people were often the first to starve. Doctors drove taxis. Engineers washed cars. PhDs traded cigarettes for potatoes.

So which skills actually survived? Not the ones you'd expect.

This video is an economic autopsy of seven major collapses across a century of data — drawing on NBER labor forensics, Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, World Bank research, and the real stories of Argentine mechanics, Cuban physicians, Russian dacha farmers, and Lebanese currency brokers — to identify the four structural categories of skills that have demonstrated resilience in every single collapse environment ever studied.


So let's take a look at what these are and how to use them...

( Read more... )

Reading: I finished listening to the audiobook of Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch, after having read the text version last year. I'm wondering which almost unintelligible accent Aaronovitch is going to make Kobna Holbrook-Smith do next. ('Straya, please! We have so many ancient places the genius loci would be amazing!) I thought Shvorne Marks did an amazing job, and it was fun to hear Abigail's version of Nightingale's accent as compared to Peter's. ( cut for possible spoilers and self-indulgence )

Currently, I'm listening to the audiobook of Project Hail Mary, and I'm glad I saw the movie first. I think I would have struggled with the amount of maths and science without the context of the film, and without my pre-established fondness for the characters. It's a reminder (to myself) that the 'book vs film' debate is mostly wind as both mediums have different strengths.

Watching (and listening): I haven't been watching anything with intent recently. We bought a huge-ass TV with our leftover christmas fund (we put money every fortnight into a christmas club account which can only be accessed in Dec/Jan) and I find it kind of repelling. Dude has been playing me a bunch of Gorillaz videos on youtube, catching me up on the lore following the release of The Mountain. I love the album (I've always had an interest in Indian music) and have been listening to it quite a bit. Dude is currently into collecting CDs and has bought a couple of earlier Gorillaz albums, which have been fun to listen to.

Making: I've been slowly working on a sweater for my brother, but it's lots of boring knitting. I'm itching to spin something, but I don't know what. I used up some leftover multi-coloured yarn with some white Cormo to make fingerless mitts for a colleague and they turned out well. The (free) pattern is Prisma Mitts and is great for a gradient yarn.



I need to do more two-colour knitting rather than trying to dye all my colours into a single yarn. *g*

Other: We're upgrading our solar system, adding more panels and a larger battery which we hope will zero-out our electricity bill. The feed-in tariff has dropped to 4 cents/kW and we expect it to drop further, so more storage is our goal.

Work is still a schmozzle. The Uni featured heavily in a recent Four Corners exposé about governance in the tertiary sector, however I don't see them rolling back the (ridiculous, terrible) organisational changes any time soon. Sigh.

Autumn is finally here. After a long summer the nights dropping to below 5C is a bit of a shock. The cat is unimpressed and insists on being wrapped in her blanket.

I got the date wrong on an appointment. I knew I had something on the 22nd, as well as the adjacent week, but I'd forgotten it was the week of the 29th, not today. I understand how I made that mistake and I'm not sure what to do to keep it from happening again, other than writing it down in a dedicated weekly planner instead of on a post-it note.

But, I ran a couple errands I'd wanted to get done. I found that swings got installed at Lincoln Center for the summer and rode one for a few minutes, and now I know they're around for another sunny day sometime soon. I was able to visit a grocery store near where my appointment would've been held and got a few things there on discount - a couple dollars less than the prices at my usual store, and while the leftover dollars went to fancy coconut water, it about balanced out. Walking downtown, someone I met at a party recognized me from the street and called out my name and we had a nice little chat. I took the time I would've spent at the appointment, went home, and got some good writing done ahead of going out tonight.

So all in all, I'm not upset about how things went today.

部首
水 part 26
湾, bay; 湿, wet; 滋, to nourish ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=85

语法
3.23 只有 X 才 Y; X is required to have Y
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
抱, to hug; 抱歉, sorry ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
人生还有很多滋味都等着你呢, there are so many flavors of life still waiting for you
只有不怕死才能活下去, only if you don't fear death can you go on living
抱歉，我没有事先跟你说明, I'm sorry I didn't explain to you in advance

Me:
今天的天气很潮湿。
你以为这份工作只有你在才能呈现呢？

This one goes out to loons and Shane Hollander and those middle-of-the-night moments of clarity.

( The Loon )

1) My partner injured yet another finger playing baseball last weekend and had to go to the emergency room. Luckily it was not broken, just dislocated. Since then we have gotten 3 phone calls from the hospital group asking for a survey response.

This is particularly irritating because this group has been buying up hospitals, clinics and medical practices in the area, and is currently the only emergency room in town and provider of certain services.

So what is the point of the survey? What choice to we have? How will any response actually do anything to improve care?

2) I've been warming to High Potential, and recently Keith Carradine guest starred. I knew I recognized him as soon as he appeared, but I couldn't place him. Instead I kept wondering why he made me think of Joel Kinnaman in For All Mankind. For sure they could play relatives.

3) I have not been reading any fic for the better part of a year now. Some months back I read about 4 or 5 that had probably been downloaded over a year earlier, but I haven't been doing offline reading for the first time in a very long time. And when it happened before it was because I didn't have access to material, whereas now I have dozens of commercial books and even more fic.

(I say "nothing" though this doesn't count the random drabble or ficlet someone recs.) ( Read more... )

4) The thing that really stood out to me about Amazon announcing they're discontinuing service to 2012 and earlier Kindles was to think that there's not many electronics that are still running after 15 years. ( Read more... )

5) The Pillowfort Anniversary festivities have ended and it was fun. Many (not even all!) of the activities could be summed up with the bingo card. ( Read more... )

I'd love to see someone else take this on in a few years' time.

March heat in the U.S. was the largest temperature anomaly ever recorded

Heat usually doesn’t define March, a month that still carries a hint of winter’s last breath. This year, it felt more like a preview of late spring, and sometimes even early summer.

Across the United States, temperatures didn’t just creep up. They jumped far beyond what anyone would expect for that time of year.

The numbers tell a blunt story. The average temperature for March hit 50.85 degrees Fahrenheit. That is 9.35 degrees higher than the 20th-century average.

It is not just a record for March. It is the largest jump above normal for any month ever recorded in the Lower 48 states.

Daytime highs pushed even further, running 11.4 degrees above average, nearly matching what people usually feel in April.


Ya THINK? It hit 89 fucking degrees here in central Illinois. REPEATEDLY.  We're also in drought conditions.  I've had to water things already planted so they don't die, in what should be the wettest time of year. >_<  I really don't want this to be another year of eight months watering.

⌈ Secret Post #7040 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1005.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Today is cloudy and mild.  It has been spitting a few drops of water now and then, but the promised storms have not arrived. :/

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches. 

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- While we were out at Whiteside Garden, I picked up a generous clump of wild ginger.  :D  I also saw a red-headed woodpecker.

We stopped at Home Depot and bought 12 concrete blocks, the kind with two holes, and water sealer.  I'm going to make a planting bench with the solid-top pallet that we obtained earlier.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- I planted the clump of wild ginger at the east end of the savanna where moss is growing.  I'm going to try establishing a woodland garden there.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- I did some work around the patio.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- I planted the mountain mint in the wildflower garden.  This looks similar to the mystery wild mint that I had before, which is among the most popular pollinator plants.  If so, that boosts genetic diversity.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 4/15/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I hauled 6 of the 12 concrete blocks out of the car.  For some reason the guy putting them on the flatbed trolley gave me two different kinds; some have flat ends and some have ridges sticking out, and these aren't the kind of blocks meant to interlock.

I am done for the night.