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Bladder Rocks

Yep, that's Biggie's Latest Adventure. The vet did an ultra sound and you can see one big one. She was surprised that Biggie didn't have any symptoms. It should be painful but while he considered it an indignity and annoyance to go the vet, he's not showing any signs of pain. But taking him off the medicine and back on to Very Expensive Prescription Food turned out to be the best option. We go back in 4 weeks and do another ultra sound. Unless he shows distress or can't pee and then we go back immediately. And, even if all goes smoothly for 4 weeks, if the rock is still there, probably surgery. Again.

Both Biggie and Julio like the expensive food, very much. so there's that. Do not tell Biggie, tho. but Temptations are a thing of the past. As are lickables. I bagged up the food and treats. I'll take them to the cat food bank.

The vet gave me some food samples. And I stashed some cans away when I switched them last year. So I've got enough on hand til the Chewy order gets here. I hope. All I've got now is canned stuff. No kibble, no treats but, hopefully, the Chewy order will be here soon.

Why in the heck did I not remember to get some grated parmesan when I went to the store to get the grated cheddar??

Also today I have a pain in the leg. It's in the middle of the thigh of my left leg. The right leg is usually the one that hurts. And this is a very weird pain plus a fair amount of weakness. The chairs at the vets are all really low to the ground and I was not sure I'd ever be able to get out of them once I sat down. It feels like if someone were to massage my thigh really hard, it would fix it. Hopefully it will fix itself today. I can at least walk around the halls here safely as they all have nice railings.

I was downstairs yesterday before the festivities but they had already lined up all the chairs. It was a weird sight.

It looked very different and couple of hours later. It was really fun to watch the parade. The employees dressed up either in costume or in really nice non-work clothes and they merrily high 5'd the old people. And, according to accounts, had a marvelous time. Very fun.

The Timber Ridge dog park is like a dog pond today but the rain has kind of stopped a little. All around us there are massive floods. The interstate is closed just north of here due to a giant mudslide. We're breaking water records all around.

I need to get a load of laundry started.

Early Earth’s belly held onto its water

Posted by Carolyn Gramling

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/early-earth-water-maga-ocean-mantle

https://www.sciencenews.org/?p=3163574

When the early Earth’s magma ocean crystallized 4.4 billion years ago, the deep mantle trapped an ocean’s worth of water, scientists say.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/early-earth-water-maga-ocean-mantle

https://www.sciencenews.org/?p=3163574

Doonesbury for Thursday, December 11, 2025

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/12/11/

Entry tags:

NoScans: And we have our Supergirl teaser trailer

( And it looks to be what we expected )

Lee Fendall House Museum and Garden in Alexandria, Virginia

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lee-fendall-house-museum-and-garden

A sidewalk view walking near the home with its historic sign

The Lee Fendall House Museum and Garden is a historic Alexandria residence that once belonged to generations of notable Americans, including lawyer Edmund Jennings Lee, Alexandria mayor E.E. Downham, and influential labor leader John L. Lewis. In total, 37 members of the Lee family lived here between 1785 and 1903, and some say the house may even be haunted.

The land was originally purchased by Henry “Light Horse” Lee, American Revolutionary War general and father of Robert E. Lee, who later sold it to his father-in-law Philip Fendall. Fendall designed the home in the “telescope” style popular in 18th-century Maryland, where he was born. A close friend of George Washington, Fendall hosted the first president at the house seven times, Washington even wrote about their conversations in letters and journals. Presidents John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson also visited the home later in its history. (Fun fact: Robert E. Lee didn’t live here, but he did grow up directly across the street.)

During the Civil War, the Lee Fendall House, along with more than 30 other Alexandria homes, was converted into a Union hospital. Known as the Grovesnor Branch Hospital, it operated under Dr. Edwin Bentley from 1863 to 1865 and became the site of the first successful blood transfusion of the Civil War.

After a number of postwar owners, the house was purchased in 1937 by John L. Lewis, the powerful and often controversial president of the United Mine Workers of America. Lewis challenged both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in the fight for workers’ rights, living in the home until his death in 1969. His son later sold the property to the Virginia Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Lee Fendall House Museum and Garden opened to the public in 1974.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lee-fendall-house-museum-and-garden

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obituaries

a sadness

supergee, aka Arthur Hlavaty, who I was never close to but enjoyed, died a day or so ago. He wrote engagingly, both on Dreamwidth/LJ and other places, apparently knew like, everyone in SF fandom. His wife's post on it, and Kalimac's reminisce.

Peace to his wife and husband, aka

nellorat and

womzilla.

He was very much a fanzine fan, and had a life and a half in various ways. He was quietly who he was, and lived his life as that; witness his family, for example. As I said, I liked him, in a "ships passing in the night" sense, and I'm mostly posting about it because... Well, people matter. The people who make up community, who are in the same places.

(Also, writer John Varley has probably died, though I haven't seen a definitive post on that yet. I've enjoyed what I read of him, but he was never one of the ones I really *connected* to.)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

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Check-In Post - Dec 11th 2025

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: Does anyone have any plans for making Christmas gifts or cards?

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

Well that's a relief

I was afraid that I've been a little too spicy in our recent department Slack conversations about AI. But I just had a "coffee chat" with one of my coworkers, and he spontaneously commented that he was impressed with how diplomatic I've been in some of our conversations. So that's a huge relief. I was worried that I was being testy/grumpy/curmudgeonly. Well, I have been all those things, but apparently I'm also managing to be polite about it outside my own head. So that's a relief.

Fewer EVs need fewer batteries: Ford and SK On end their joint venture

Posted by Jonathan M. Gitlin

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/12/fewer-evs-need-fewer-batteries-ford-and-sk-on-end-their-joint-venture/

Cast your mind back to 2021. Electric vehicles were hot stuff, buoyed by Tesla’s increasingly stratospheric valuation and a general optimism fueled by what would turn out to be the most significant climate-focused spending package in US history. For some time, automakers had been promising an all-electric future, and they started laying the groundwork to make that happen, partnering with battery suppliers and the like.

Take Ford—that year, it announced a joint venture with SK to build a pair of battery factories, one in Kentucky, the other in Tennessee. BlueOvalSK represented an $11.4 billion investment that would create 11,000 jobs, we were told, and an annual output of 60 GWh from both plants.

Four years later, things look very different. EV subsidies are dead, as is any inclination by the current government to hold automakers accountable for selling too many gas guzzlers. EV-heavy product plans have been thrown out, and designs for new combustion-powered cars are being dusted off and spiffed up. Fewer EVs means a need for fewer batteries, and today we saw that in evidence when it emerged that Ford and SK On are ending their battery factory joint venture.

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Comments

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/12/fewer-evs-need-fewer-batteries-ford-and-sk-on-end-their-joint-venture/

No sterile neutrinos after all, say MicroBooNE physicists

Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/microboone-results-rule-out-sterile-neutrinos/

Since the 1990s, physicists have pondered the tantalizing possibility of an exotic fourth type of neutrino, dubbed the “sterile” neutrino, that doesn’t interact with regular matter at all, apart from its fellow neutrinos, perhaps. But definitive experimental evidence for sterile neutrinos has remained elusive. Now it looks like the latest results from Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment have ruled out the sterile neutrino entirely, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

How did the possibility of sterile neutrinos even become a thing? It all dates back to the so-called “solar neutrino problem.” Physicists detected the first solar neutrinos from the Sun in 1966. The only problem was that there were far fewer solar neutrinos being detected than predicted by theory, a conundrum that became known as the solar neutrino problem. In 1962, physicists discovered a second type (“flavor”) of neutrino, the muon neutrino. This was followed by the discovery of a third flavor, the tau neutrino, in 2000.

Physicists already suspected that neutrinos might be able to switch from one flavor to another. In 2002, scientists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (or SNO) announced that they had solved the solar neutrino problem. The missing solar (electron) neutrinos were just in disguise, having changed into a different flavor on the long journey between the Sun and the Earth. If neutrinos oscillate, then they must have a teensy bit of mass after all. That posed another knotty neutrino-related problem. There are three neutrino flavors, but none of them has a well-defined mass. Rather, different kinds of “mass states” mix together in various ways to produce electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. That’s quantum weirdness for you.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/microboone-results-rule-out-sterile-neutrinos/

Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI, licenses 200 characters for AI video app Sora

Posted by Benj Edwards

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/disney-invests-1-billion-in-openai-licenses-200-characters-for-ai-video-app-sora/

On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create short clips featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. It’s the first major content licensing partnership between a Hollywood studio related to the most recent version of OpenAI’s AI video platform, which drew criticism from some parts of the entertainment industry when it launched in late September.

“Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the announcement. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”

The deal creates interesting bedfellows between a company that basically defined modern US copyright policy through congressional lobbying back in the 1990s and one that has argued in a submission to the UK House of Lords that useful AI models cannot be created without copyrighted material.

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https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/disney-invests-1-billion-in-openai-licenses-200-characters-for-ai-video-app-sora/

Entry tags:

Be all the beautiful things you are, and be them without apology.

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Pop Music Is Getting Darker

Posted by Kristen French

https://nautil.us/pop-music-is-getting-darker-1254039/

https://nautil.us/?p=1254039

Beneath the sugary hooks of today’s biggest pop hits, there’s often a distinctly dark undercurrent. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” about a swaggering antihero who seduces a dad, Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” about a toxic, violent relationship, and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” about a vengeful feud, all topped the charts over the past couple of decades.

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It may be more than a momentary trend. A new study shows that, over the past 50 years, the lyrics of the hit songs in the United States have taken a gloomy turn: They’ve gotten a lot more stressed and more negative. They’ve also gotten less complex. This trend may mirror growing rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S., and increasing negativity in news, but it could also reflect general shifts in the way we use language and the evolution of other societal norms, the authors of the study report. They published their findings today in Scientific Reports.

The study is part of a growing body of research that aims to track how patterns of cultural consumption can provide insights into the psychological states of individuals or even entire populations. Music is a particularly apt cultural form for this kind of analysis, the scientists argue, because it is one of the most widely appreciated, with average listening time reported to be as high as 21 hours per week. They also suggest that music has a shorter production cycle than movies or books, which means it is better able to reflect year-to-year shifts in moods, while the lyrics of many songs often express specific emotional content, which make them easy to analyze.

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The scientists, from Vienna and Lisbon, analyzed the top 100 Billboard English-language songs in the U.S. every week for the period stretching from 1973 to 2023, which adds up to more than 20,000 unique songs. For each of the songs, they measured how often words related to worry, stress, tension cropped up, the tunes’ overall positive or negative sentiment, and the complexity of their lyrics—how simple or repetitive they were.

The results suggest a general trend of simpler and more negative lyrics in popular songs over the past five decades, with a rise in stress-related words. The authors also tracked the changes in lyrics against fluctuations in real median household incomes across the U.S., but weren’t able to find any correlation with stress, sentiment, or complexity. So financial abundance doesn’t seem to drive the emotional tone of hit lyrics.

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To gauge how societal shocks might influence the trend, the scientists looked at what happened to song lyrics around the tumbling of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Surprisingly, lyrics got less stressed and negative during the pandemic, but more complex, which the authors took to mean that during times of upheaval, people may use music as a form of escapism or stress release. Previous research had suggested that people often choose to listen to darker or more contemplative music following traumatic events, in order to better process their grief.

The findings suggest that music can act as a kind of thermometer for the larger cultural mood. It both shapes and reflects the collective spirit.

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Lead image: ATRANG / Shutterstock

https://nautil.us/pop-music-is-getting-darker-1254039/

https://nautil.us/?p=1254039

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Amazing Spider-Man #17

( Scans under the cut... )

Current Mood: Facepalm

Entry tags:

politics,
wtaf?!?

WTAF, 3

Apparently Calibri is un-American because it's easier for people with dyslexia to read.

Seriously.

State Department to switch from "woke" Calibri to Times New Roman

Perhaps Rubio should also insist they write everything in BOLD CAPS like the glorious leader?

Entry tags:

италия аморе мио

почта

Заказали мужу ботинки на заландо, не подошли, надо возвращать. Запаковала, наклеила этикетку и пошла на почту. Почта у нас не торопливая, но, по опыту, думала нуууу... 40 минут. Ну час, если талончики не работают. Пришла, талончики работают. У меня для посылок номер 86.
( Read more... )

Entry tags:

скайнет

(no subject)

OpenAI 2015: profit - $0
OpenAI 2025: profit - $0,000,000,000

Венчурный капиталистер проговорился: "I view AI primarily as an incredible labor-saving device ... I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that 'new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.' I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from ... I find it hard to imagine a world in which AI works shoulder-to-shoulder with all the people who are employed today. How can employment not decline?"

Ну и вообще: "The other thing the optimists say is that 'the beneficial impact of AI on productivity will cause a huge acceleration in GDP growth.' Here I have specific quibbles:

* The change in GDP can be thought of as the change in hours worked times the change in output per hour (aka 'productivity'). The role of AI in increasing productivity means it will take fewer hours worked – meaning fewer workers – to produce the goods we need.

* Or, viewed from the other direction, maybe the boom in productivity will mean a lot more goods can be produced with the same amount of labor. But if a lot of jobs are lost to AI, how will people be able to afford the additional goods AI enables to be produced?

I imagine government’s response will be something called 'universal basic income.' The government will simply mail checks to the millions for whom there are no jobs. But the worrier in me finds problems in this, too:

* Where will the money come from for those checks? The job losses I foresee imply reduced income tax receipts and increased spending on entitlements. This puts a further burden on the declining segment of the population that is working and implies even greater deficits ahead. In this new world, will governments be able to fund ever-increasing deficits?

* And more importantly, people get a lot more from jobs than just a paycheck. A job gives them a reason to get up in the morning, imparts structure to their day, gives them a productive role in society and self-respect, and presents them with challenges, the overcoming of which provides satisfaction. How will these things be replaced? I worry about large numbers of people receiving subsistence checks and sitting around idle all day. I worry about the correlation between the loss of jobs in mining and manufacturing in recent decades and the incidence of opioid addiction and shortening of lifespans."

The Friday Five for 12 December 2025

1. Did you get an allowance as a kid, and if so, how much was it?

2. How old were you when you had your first job, and what was it?

3. Which do you do better: save money or spend money?

4. Are people more likely to borrow money from you, or are you more likely to borrow from them?

5. What's the most expensive thing you've ever bought?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!