Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/1/21/sleepytime-blep

Via Seneca Park Zoo, which writes:

Sailor turned 19 [two weeks ago] 🥳🦦 and that’s something worth celebrating!

North American river otters typically live to about 13 years in their natural range, so Sailor’s longevity is a strong reflection of the care he receives here at the Zoo.

Our teams work hard to meet his physical, mental, and social needs, and milestones like this are a reminder of how important conservation programs like ours are!

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/1/21/sleepytime-blep

Today would have been my mother's 79th birthday. It's been 3.5 years, I still miss her.

Her sister, my aunt, is in hospital following a stroke last week, and not expected to recover. My cousins are on their way to Australia (possibly there by now) and hoping to arrive in time to say goodbye.

I walked to work this morning in a downpour with angsty-sad music in my headphones, and let myself cry it out while no-one was watching. In the last few minutes of my walk, the sun briefly shone through the clouds, and the music algorithm played me something more upbeat. I took in the moment of beauty, and walked on.

The combination of the earlier wet snow, now coalesced, and the fresh snow has created pretty much perfect conditions for xc skiing according to my wife. She's getting ready to go out in -10c.

I'll stay under the covers.

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Reached a couple of milestones yesterday, and I'm mentally basically ready to shift back into working on my original projects. Just trying to remember where I'm at with everything. Also cool milestone alert!

Milestone alert: GYWO monthly goal for January, reached! ;)

With my pledge, I should write 12.5k words a month, and now I'll have reached it at least once this year!! It feels really good to start the year being on track. As much as Time Is A Construct, I think I should be careful not to set myself up for big editing projects in January in the future, in general.

I'm so surprised that over 5k of that was for a Spring Thunder fic. Like. I do write freely for tiny fandoms! But usually it's more like coughing out a vignette or a missing scene, or a tiny fix-it to deal with canon stress. Not a full hurt/comfort rescue mission. In the end though, I wrote it for the same reasons I wrote those shorter vignettes in the past: it feels good :D It feels right. It was fun. AND I get to reread and enjoy something tailored to my id in the future :D I was delighted with myself by the end of the first draft, hopefully that'll hold when I return to it for edits :D

Time-sensitive fics

I'll likely just let most of the unposted stuff I wrote rest for a while. Couple of exceptions I have in mind:

• Well I do need to proofread and post my Candy Hearts assignment. That would be good to do on time XD
• For my last 600 words to reach the milestone yesterday, I wrote something for Wind Breaker that will probably be invalidated by a new manga chapter next week. I'd like to clean that up and post it so there's a chance it can be enjoyed as-is for a few days before becoming canon divergent XD
• Not really time-sensitive, but I want to post a couple of BNHA fics to get them out of my mind. One was written 3y ago for a collaborative project that never quite completed its landing and I think it's long enough. I need to free my mind of it before I forget it even exists.

Original stuff

( Cursed Witch pacing check )

( Soul Thief edit preps Take Two )

This was supposed to help me figure out what to do this morning, but it didn't really help in the end! Maybe I'll see if there's a fic in an editable state. I know there's a couple of finished drafts in there, but for some of those I wanted to do a canon review first... Gah!! So many fun things to do, so little time :D

I've got a few more drabbles, to match the ones I did earlier.

( seven new drabbles )

Title: Winter Bones
Fandom: TSUBASA: RESERvoir CHRoNiCLE
Characters/Pairings: Fay D Fluorite (with hints of Kurogane/Fay)
Notes: I went through the eighty thousand fanmixes I made about my anime boyfriend back in the day and picked the best tracks

Listen: Spotify

( why do I need anyone else when I can break the sky myself? ♫ )

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: eBook/Audiobook

That's a Great Question, I'd Love to Tell You is a 2025 memoir by comedian/musician/online personality Elyse Myers. It's a collection of essays, free verse poetry, and lists that take a humorous but heartfelt look at formative and vulnerable moments in her life, with a retrospective understanding of the anxiety and undiagnosed neurodivergence that often shaped them.

Stories include a childhood fixation on a Magic 8 Ball, overthinking and missing the obvious during a teenage game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, college panic attacks, Parisian dates gone awry, beach encounters gone sour, and conquering the mysteries of gravel roads. Anyone familiar with Elyse Myers' work online knows she has a way of telling a story and getting a laugh while also not being afraid to be earnest. If you haven't seen her videos before, you can check her out on TikTok or on Youtube.

I don't listen to a ton of audiobooks, my main exception being memoirs that are read by their authors. That usually works out for me, but in this case I really wish I'd gone with the print book for three reasons:

1) It turns out the print edition is full of little illustrations and creative formatting that brings a lot to some of the pieces.

2) One of the things I enjoy about Myers is her more freeform and sometimes frenetic delivery, but this was a more sedate and traditional audiobook performance.

3) Related to #2, several stories triggered some secondhand embarrassment for me and having to listen to that be slowly relayed instead of being able to read faster during those was rough.

( An Excerpt )

damn near had to zip my jacket this morning (it was 14 F) Less said about work the better (still dealing with the issues of that mix up) but the funny thing is we were loaned (from another failing program) the autoclave and incubators. So I went in to see how they were going as my researchers are ramping up. The autoclave isn't put together (and the fuse box is MIA) and NONE of the incubators are done. Me and DM were working on them. It's like incubators by IKEA and it's ALL in German and nothing is complete (I have a German student, I might drag him in there) It's so dumb I'm laughing.

Today was Cheese Cake and Golden Girls at the library. Just bring/eat cheesecake and watch a couple episodes of GG. It was packed. I was someone's hero because I gave her some of my lactose pills (she forgot hers). You'll share them? Yes, of course. It was fun except....for the two tables in the back who just kept talking thru the entire first episode we watched. Like fucking non stop. I really wanted to say hey, STFU. We're here trying to enjoy ourselves but we can't even hear teh show. I hate that women are so well trained to be 'nice' that sometimes making waves is hard. And then they had the audacity to shove in a couple pieces of cheesecake and then left without watching the first 30 minutes all the way thru. Didn't care. Glad they gone.

Came home. Realized OMG the authors zoom is tonight and I'm exhausted. I shook it off. Wrote over 2500 words in 1 1/2 hours. Well yay for me.

No fannish 50. I'm too tired again.

Also dummy went outside this morning. Refused to come back. I'm like of all days to go out and run off rocket. He's back and he's fine.

1. Got my hair cut this morning. Carla wanted to get hers trimmed before her trip (she's going to Wisconsin for a week tomorrow for her aunt's 80th birthday) so it was the both of us and we decided to pop over to Universal Studios for lunch afterwards. The crowds were so low! If we'd stayed to go on any rides, almost everything was like 20 minutes or less, even the massively popular ones. As it was, we just had a nice lunch, spotted some characters, and came home.

2. Because of the haircut appointment, which was awkwardly timed for late morning, I just made today a WFH day. Did some stuff in the morning before we went, and then had a meeting later in the afternoon. I didn't really have a whole lot on the agenda for today anyway, so it worked out well.

3. Shake Shack is apparently having a Korean inspired menu right now, so we got the burgers with Korean BBQ sauce. They were so good! There's also a chicken sandwich and fries with kimchi powder and dipping sauce, and even a caramel gochujang shake, so if they've still got this stuff on the menu when Carla gets back from her trip, we're planning to try some of those as well. Actually now that I think of it, there's one near work, so I might just go over there for lunch one day...

4. Warming bed + stretching = best combo.

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72649&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=submissive-woman-or-bound-slave-interpreting-oracle-bone-forms-as-a-rorschach-test

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72649

We've been discussing the oracle bone form (late 2nd millennium BC) of nǚ女 ("woman; female"):

(WP)

I've always felt that it shows the profile of a submissive, kneeling female figure with her arms crossed in front of her (I say this after examining scores of variants of OB forms of 女).

Lately, however, some scholars have interpreted the oracle bone graph in radically different ways, e.g., the figure is a slave with arms bound in front of or behind him.

If that is the case, how do we get to "woman; female", which nǚ 女 (during the last three millennia), both by itself and as the radical (Kangxi no. 38) of hundreds (681) of other graphs having to do with women or feminine affairs / characteristics as it has indubitably signified during the last three millennia?

So I asked Axel Schuessler, the foremost etymologist of Old Sinitic, how he would interpret the oracle bone forms of nǚ 女.  He replied:

—–

PS: à propos graphs being like Rorschach tests: the interpretation says sometimes more about the viewer that the graph itself. This graph meaning ‘woman’ makes people (naturally) look for anatomical markers, i.e. breasts; those living in a modern left ideology look for oppression of women everywhere and promptly find it, hence woman as slave.

I think this is the sort of painting Axel had in mind:

Selected readings

• "Women's script wins in the end" (1/19/26)
• "Women's writing: dead or alive" (10/2/20)
• "Misogyny as reflected in Chinese characters" (12/25/15)
• "Women's words" (2/2/16)
• "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
• "Nüshu" Wikipedia

 

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72649&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=submissive-woman-or-bound-slave-interpreting-oracle-bone-forms-as-a-rorschach-test

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72649

It's been well below freezing all day, and the only time I've spent outdoors was the pair of bike rides to and from the gig location, which itself is barely a 20 block ride. It was more than enough for my fingers and ears to get uncomfortably chilled, though I take it as a point of pride that continuing to mask up means my nose and mouth are just fine. I'm still thinking often on how safe I am for this cold snap - a safe place to sleep, hot water, layers to bundle up. Mostly, the tiredness comes from having rearranged a fairly sizable home library's substantial fiction section, up and down a stepladder, picking up armfuls of books over and over, and it's not digging a ditch, but between hours of that and the cold, I'm feeling pretty wiped.

I think next time I go, I'll bring a canned coffee with me. See about heading this off ahead of time.

The conference was interesting, if maybe 1 panel too long (it ended at 4:55 pm, but the last panel was...not great, imo), though the lunch options were, to me, appalling. (Many people ate and enjoyed the sandwiches but there was not one that I would eat. I made do with salad, chips, and cookies.) My boss and I both felt validated by some things being mentioned that we already do and some that we are planning to do (if the new board chair approves), so that part was good too.

It was hard to get up (it was hard to sleep, knowing I had to get up 90 minutes earlier than usual), but I did it. I also saw two fun signs on the way: "Lube Entrance" and "You can ship anything." As devildoll said when I told her, I'll take AO3 tags for $200, Alex. *g*

Now I'm going to try to stay awake for another hour and then go to bed because I am le tired.

*

Universal Studios has short hours during the off season, making it inconvenient to go for dinner on weeknights, but today we had an opportunity to go for lunch since we were sort of partway there.

The park wasn't crowded at all, but all the good parking was taken, so we had to park at the ET parking structure, which is at the far end of CityWalk, but at least that meant we got a nice walk to and from the park as well as inside.

( Read more... )

部首
心 part 21
愿, to wish; 慌, to panic; 慢, slow ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=61

语法
2.19 (part 1) Result complements 完，会，懂，住
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-2-grammar

词汇
程序, program; 工程, engineering/project ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
你真的愿意帮助我们, are you really willing to help us?
你听我把话说完, wait until I'm finished talking
龙城大学生物工程系的教授, a professor in the bioengineering department at Dragon City University

Me:
慢慢来，别急。
你听不懂的话，我就再说一遍。

Not dead. Just a lot of stuff.

Mom has been moved to the new place (which is also memory care -- she hates being locked in) and when I visited her last week it was not great at all. The place looks nice but mom was insistent that she needed to go back to OldPlace and I could take her. (I declined. Six times.). I need to decide how often I'm visiting her, because I can't do every week.

Wrote a story for Yuletide (pinch hit) and I love the source and I have no energy to write up all the stuff I want to say

Have FOP flareup under my jaw. I can still chew but mouth opening is restricted -- about the size of a slice of bread's thickness -- and chewing is effortful. Have to take smaller bites so there's more chewing needed too. Have started prednisone (ee) so hopefully that will help. No clue if this is permanent or will resolve. At night it feels like I have something heavy resting on my neck; it doesn't interfere with breathing but it's kinda uncomfortable and getting to sleep is harder.

I've been playing a (free with gacha elements) casual life sim game called Heartopia. So cute. I've just adopted a cat (golden spotted, looks like a bengal) and have unlocked the option to adopt a dog but can't decide which one (golden retriever I name Phoebe? Black lab named Yahtzee? Shiba Inu? Corgi? Husky?). Also you can interact with wildlife. So much cuteness! I love.

( Read more... )