knotwave | Reading

For Poetry Monday:

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson, Ursula K. Le Guin

A black and white cat
on May grass waves his tail, suns his belly
among wallflowers.
I am reading a Chinese poet
called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.
The cat is aware of the writing
of swallows
on the white sky.
We are both old and doing what pleases us
in the garden. Now I am writing
and the cat
is sleeping.
Whose poem is this?

—L.

Subject quote from Time in a Bottle, Jim Croce.

conuly

So, I'm reading something about an abusive relationship. So toxic, in every tiny respect. But the commenters! You've got a handful of them happily chirping things like "Oh, Abuser is trying so hard! He's really just controlling because he's worried, but look, he's trying to make Abusee happy!" and we've got another handful saying things like "I don't get why Abusee doesn't just leave. I mean, he's in public, is he scared of getting hit? In public? Like, geez."

Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?

Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.

(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)

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conuly

The music is great, but the plot + worldbuilding raises some issues that they don't bother to even attempt to address properly.

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thewayne

A tarball is an old compression format that predates zip files, it was used in Ye Olde Dayes to archive a whole bunch of files into one big humongoid file for convenience.

Anyway, it looks like recovery of the tape was successful! With everything going on in my life, I don't have the ability to dig into the story right now, just wanted to get this out for my fellow geeks. Here's the Slashdot summary that you can dive into if you like:

Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).

Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972.

The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/21/020235/bell-labs-unix-tape-from-1974-successfully-dumped-to-a-tarball

pshaw_raven

I don't have a Substack specifically for fiction set in Muna. I might start one, I don't know. It seems like a bad idea to mix the two worlds, even if they're kind of similar. So here's a wintery Muna story. Put your warm socks on, we're going hiking in the worst possible conditions.

( The Yule Tree )

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: boygenius & Ye Vagabonds - The Parting Glass

conuly

Watch on YouTube

larryhammer

Meanwhile, in the annals of contemporary linguistics, I’ve become fascinated with the adverbial use by certain Gen-Alphas of low-key. It also has the same adjectival uses that have been around for a while, but when used as an adverb, it’s a mild intensifier, roughly comparable to rather, so slightly stronger than kinda but weaker than very. (I’ve heard someone use kinda then correct themselves to low-key to strengthen the statement.)

What’s fascinating, though, is that it almost always modifies negative attributes — bad, tired, hungry, bored. The main exceptions I’ve heard are negations of negative attributes, so both “low-key hungry” and “low-key not hungry.” Both forms, ofc, include negations, which might be why both are acceptable?

This is even more interesting than how derogatory mid is — it doesn’t mean “middling” quality, like it first sounded, but thoroughly mediocre. And yes, something can be low-key mid.

---L.

Subject quote from The Duck Song, Bryant Oden.

prettygoodword

mahi-mahi or mahimahi (MA-hee-ma-hee) - n., a large game fish (Coryphaena hippurus) found worldwide in tropical and temperate oceans, also called the common dolphinfish.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Good eating, and eaten worldwide pretty much. We got the name from Hawaiian mahimahi, but it's also called that in related languages such as Tahitian, emphatic reduplication of mahi, strong.

And even though I've run this before, because I can't resist such a fun word, a bonus fish name: humuhumunukunukuapuaa (hoo-moo-hoo-moo-noo-koo-noo-koo-ah-poo-AH-ah) - n., the reef triggerfish (Rhinecantus rectangulus). This comes up surprisingly often (hat-tip to Octonauts) because it's Hawaii's state fish. In Hawaiian, humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa is a compound of humuhumu, triggerfish +‎ nuku, snout +‎ nuku, blunt +‎ ā, conjunction between two adjectives +‎ puaʻa, pig-like, so "triggerfish with a short, piglike snout." And no, I haven't found what triggerfish has a piglike snout that isn't short, making that an oddly specific name.

And with that, I'm finally done with words English acquired from Native languages of the New World. I'm taking next week off due to holiday chaos, and possibly the week after (we'll see how chaotic things are).

---L.

pshaw_raven

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
the AC was running, 'cause we live in the South.

Current Mood: hot

pshaw_raven

1. What is one thing about you that you hate?
I feel like I'm out of sync with other people. Like everyone's been issued an instruction book that I didn't get, and I'm just wandering around clueless.

2. What is one thing about you that you love?
I'm working on that one.

3. If you had to change one thing about you what would it be and why?
I wish I weren't so prone to anxiety. Anxious and fearful feelings have been the background noise of my life since I was a small child.

4. What is one word that you would use to define yourself?
Eremitic

5. Imagine what you would look like in a perfect world...what do you look like?
I would look like the athlete I am. Unfortunately, like many people I often confuse the appearance of fitness models with the appearance of athletes. That is to say, a woman who can deadlift her own body weight is unlikely to look like the chick in the ad for protein powder.

Current Mood: okay

conuly

when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

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kass

Found via

laurashapiro, this is so worth one minute of your time. The last couplet in this clip is just -- ::chef's kiss!::

Hot Hanukkah

prettygoodword

muumuu (MOO-moo) - n., a long loose-fitting dress made of lightweight fabric printed with bright, stylized Hawaiian themes.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Introduced by Christian missionaries in several Polynesian cultures in the early 1800s, intended as an undergarment to a fuller dress that covered up more of those "half-naked savages," but in Hawaii it evolved into a dress on its own that's better suited to the climate. (The fuller dress, now sometimes called a Mother Hubbard dress, is a holokū in Hawaiian.) The Hawaiian name, muʻumuʻu, pronounced with four syllables, means cut-off/shortened, because it lacks the yoke and long sleeves of the holokū.

---L.

conuly

As we all know - or anyway, as most of us know - words are capitalized like names if they're used like names and titles.

This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"

But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.

It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.

The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.

I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.

Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.

prettygoodword

pahoehoe (pah-HOH-ay-hoh-ay, puh-HOH-ee-hoh-ee) - n., basaltic (i.e. mafic) lava with a smooth or billowy surface.

aa or a'a (AH-ah) - n. basaltic (i.e. mafic) lava with a jagged, clinkery surface.

Fresh aa flowing over cool pahoehoe:

hot aa on cool pahoehoe

Thanks, WikiMedia!

So a bit of volcanology. I ran mafic and felsic as a pair a while ago, but in sum, lava with a lot of silica, called felsic, is viscous and traps gas, so is associated with explosive eruptions, while lava with very little silica, called mafic or basaltic, is runny and lets gas escape, and so it associated with lava flows and shield volcanoes such as the entire Hawaii archipelago. If the surface of a lava flow cools rapidly, the skin solidifies then gets broken up as the lava beneath it flows on, becoming aa -- but if it cools slowly, it flows smoothly and becomes pahoehoe. The Anglicized forms of the Hawaiian words for these two types of lava flow were popularized by American geologist Clarence Dutton starting in the 1880s. The Hawaiian words themselves are pāhoehoe, from nominalizing prefix pā- meaning "having the qualities of" + hoe-hoe, reduplication of hoe, to paddle (so essentially, "like paddle ripples"), and ʻaʻā, to burn/glow/fury.

---L.

larryhammer

A link for you, and a link for you, and, yes, a link for you, too. All three are for the anonymous gifter of a paid account -- thank you, whoever you are:

Drone videos of black sand beaches in Iceland.

There I Ruined It presents Santa Claus Is Coming to Town as sung by Radiohead, to the tune of “Creep.” (via)

A contemporary (1813) review of Pride and Prejudice. That Mr Collins was considered a recognizable type and not a caricature is interesting. (via lost)

---L.

Subject quote from On Grafton Street, Nanci Griffith.

prettygoodword

luau (loo-OW, LOO-ow) - n., an elaborate Hawaiian feast featuring traditional foods and entertainment.

A luau held by King Kalakaua with Robert Louis Stevenson and his family:

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Traditionally, a feast that included lūʻau the food, taro leaf stew, which is eaten in various local varieties throughout Polynesia. The tradition started in 1819 when King Kamehameha II abolished the taboo against men and women eating together by throwing and attended such a feast -- though it took until 1850 for the name of one common dish to be applied to the whole luau, and longer for it to be the only standard name. In modern Hawaiian practice, border between a luau and a celebratory party is somewhat blurred.

---L.

conuly

Today's temperatures: Started below 20, "feels like" in the single digits. But not to worry, within a week we should be in the 50s!

And they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.

And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.

kass

I haven't listened to Night Vale in a few years, but I happened to see this mentioned by one of the creators on bluesky and I am listening now and it is so weird and delightful.

Welcome to Night Vale, ep 280: The Story of Hanukkah

I'm not sure I knew that Cecil and Carlos are both canonically Jewish? (Or at least -- Cecil has a bubbe and a zaide, from whom he inherited a chanukiyah?) Though I suppose the fact of a floating cat named Choshech should've tipped me off.

(Needless to say, the story of Chanukah articulated in this episode does not initially seem to have anything to do with Chanukah. But stick with it. It's wonderful.)

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday, more autumn from an early Modernist:

Leaves, Frederic Manning

A frail and tenuous mist lingers on baffled and intricate branches;
Little gilt leaves are still, for quietness holds every bough;
Pools in the muddy road slumber, reflecting indifferent stars;
Steeped in the loveliness of moonlight is earth, and the valleys,
Brimmed up with quiet shadow, with a mist of sleep.

But afar on the horizon rise great pulses of light,
The hammering of guns, wrestling, locked in conflict
Like brute, stone gods of old struggling confusedly;
Then overhead purrs a shell, and our heavies
Answer, with sudden clapping bruits of sound,
Loosening our shells that stream whining and whimpering precipitately,
Hounding through air athirst for blood.

And the little gilt leaves
Flicker in falling, like waifs and flakes of flame.

Manning (1882-1935) was an Australian-born writer best known for his WWI novels, but he was also a significant Imagist. This is from 1915.

---L.

Subject quote from In August, William Dean Howells.