Nothing Serious
Dec. 8th, 2025 09:26 pmI'll just say that Calvin the Dog seems to be healing up nicely after last week's surgery. Ruby is not sure this is a good thing.
Of course, Ruby is far from certain that *Calvin* is a good thing...
Fujisawa 2025-Dec-08
Dec. 9th, 2025 10:53 amSo, yesterday: I worried I'd gotten a germ after all, since I woke up with a slight sore throat and almost-congestion. There was an alternative explanation, "sleeping in a cold dry room", but who knows. I went out for a walk and ended up out for 3 hours, which suggests good health, though I was doing easy pace. ( Read more... )
Allergic To Working
Dec. 9th, 2025 01:00 amRead Allergic To Working
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Coworker: "I was working with [Other Coworker] yesterday and she was sick, so I got whatever she's got."
Me: "[Other Coworker] wasn't sick yesterday, she just has seasonal allergies."
Read Allergic To Working
This too shall pass
Dec. 9th, 2025 12:09 amMonday. Sunny and jeez it’s cold.
Got up at Stoopid O’clock, drank tea with the Happy Lite. The look! on Rook’s face when he realized I was Sitting In The Sun, and immediately jumped up to hold my lap against all comers, which was of course a reverse treat when I needed to get up. Breakfast was the last of the unfrozen broccoli/potato/cheese soup. Lunch was a microwave box of something or nother — beef and veggies.
Got a little writing done but spent most of my morning wrangling the damn timeline. Went from having too much time not having enough time. Right on Schedule. And it is by These Signs that Ye Shall Know Your Book is Progressing.
Trash and recycling in the garage, awaiting tomorrow’s march to the curb. I gave up and put flannel sheets on the bed, and also taped the snow rug to the nonslip backing.
Need to do some banking, then I’m going Round Two with the timeline wrasslin’.
Tomorrow, I have my annual eye appointment in the morning, needlework in the evening, and the post office somewhere in-between. Maybe the grocery, too. I’ll check. Not supposed to snow again until late Tuesday. Wednesday is a writing day. Thursday PT in the morning.
Thursday evening is Meet ‘n Greet the new town manager in the evening. I wanna talk public transportation. If you’re grounded for health or other reasons in this town in winter, you’re outta luck. The taxis are even worse now than they were when I was volunteering at the hospital, and it was stupid, then. The mobility bus will stop for you, but only if you call them ahead of time; there’s no, like, route. I realize this is not unique to Waterville, but — damn, it’s sad. And don’t Uber me. Just — don’t.
How’s the week starting out for you?
#
So, today started out rocky, but got better as I kept putting one foot in front of the other. Possibly timeline wrasslin’ is a tonic.
I do understand how risky it is to say things like this, but — I think I have a handle on the timing, and there’s enough time for the things that need to happen to actually happen, once We All Agreed that That Thing There was not an immovable object. In Point of Actual Fact, there are exactly two immovable objects in this Entire Novel. (I mean, granted, there is one thing that it would hurt to move, but even it isn’t immovable, and? It doesn’t have to move, so — go, me.)
In other news, I forgot to call about a haircut again. Sheesh.
I got two cards in the mail today. Clearly, these people are overachievers, and I appreciate their efforts. I do like to get cards.
The coon cats are having Happy Hour, and I should probably get something to eat, being as I’m kinda bushed over here (ref rising at Stoopid O’Clock).
Everybody have a good evening. Stay safe. I’ll check in tomorrow.
Pictures of coon cats here.
Today’s blog post title brought to you by OK Go “This Too Shall Pass” with commentary. The song’s OK. The commentary is hysterical.
This too shall pass
Dec. 8th, 2025 07:08 pmMonday. Sunny and jeez it's cold.
Got up at Stoopid O'clock, drank tea with the Happy Lite. The look! on Rook's face when he realized I was Sitting In The Sun, and immediately jumped up to hold my lap against all comers, which was of course a reverse treat when I needed to get up. Breakfast was the last of the unfrozen broccoli/potato/cheese soup. Lunch was a microwave box of something or nother -- beef and veggies.
Got a little writing done but spent most of my morning wrangling the damn timeline. Went from having too much time not having enough time. Right on Schedule. And it is by These Signs that Ye Shall Know Your Book is Progressing.
Trash and recycling in the garage, awaiting tomorrow's march to the curb. I gave up and put flannel sheets on the bed, and also taped the snow rug to the nonslip backing.
Need to do some banking, then I'm going Round Two with the timeline wrasslin'.
Tomorrow, I have my annual eye appointment in the morning, needlework in the evening, and the post office somewhere in-between. Maybe the grocery, too. I'll check. Not supposed to snow again until late Tuesday. Wednesday is a writing day. Thursday PT in the morning.
Thursday evening is Meet 'n Greet the new town manager in the evening. I wanna talk public transportation. If you're grounded for health or other reasons in this town in winter, you're outta luck. The taxis are even worse now than they were when I was volunteering at the hospital, and it was stupid, then. The mobility bus will stop for you, but only if you call them ahead of time; there's no, like, route. I realize this is not unique to Waterville, but -- damn, it's sad. And don't Uber me. Just -- don't.
How's the week starting out for you?
#
So, today started out rocky, but got better as I kept putting one foot in front of the other. Possibly timeline wrasslin' is a tonic.
I do understand how risky it is to say things like this, but -- I think I have a handle on the timing, and there's enough time for the things that need to happen to actually happen, once We All Agreed that That Thing There was not an immovable object. In Point of Actual Fact, there are exactly two immovable objects in this Entire Novel. (I mean, granted, there is one thing that it would hurt to move, but even it isn't immovable, and? It doesn't have to move, so -- go, me.)
In other news, I forgot to call about a haircut again. Sheesh.
I got two cards in the mail today. Clearly, these people are overachievers, and I appreciate their efforts. I do like to get cards.
The coon cats are having Happy Hour, and I should probably get something to eat, being as I'm kinda bushed over here (ref rising at Stoopid O'Clock).
Everybody have a good evening. Stay safe. I'll check in tomorrow.
Pictures of coon cats here.
Today's blog post title brought to you by OK Go "This Too Shall Pass" with commentary. The song's OK. The commentary is hysterical.
A Super Salad
Dec. 8th, 2025 11:00 pmRead A Super Salad
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Coworker: "You know, all food is either soup or salad."
Me: "…What?"
Coworker: "Think about it. If it’s all mixed together in one bowl, that’s soup. If it’s separate, that’s salad."
Read A Super Salad
more IRA paperwork
Dec. 8th, 2025 05:45 pmThey provided the medallion for my signature, but the woman who handled that told me she thought I would need to redo the _Fidelity_ forms once BNY had transferred the funds, because the inherited IRA would need a brand-new account, not the one I created for the purpose a few weeks ago. Having printed and signed those forms, I asked her to keep them, in case they are usable. (She may have been thinking I'm trying to move the money into an account that already has money in it.)
She also said I do need to put the form with the medallion signature in the mail to BNY, Fidelity can't send it to them electronically. I brought the medallion-ized form home with me, but before I put it in the mail I'm going to scan it and upload the scan to the Fidelity website, in case the previous advisor is right and they can do this electronically.
So that will be another outing in the cold, to a post office, in the hope the letter gets to BNY in good season despite both Christmas packages and the Republican effort to destroy the postal service. Fortunately, there are post office branches at this end of the green line, the part that's still running trolleys.
ETA: I scanned the document, and just uploaded it to the Fidelity website, with a message explaining that I will be mailing the hardcopy to BNY tomorrow.
Sounds Like The Next ‘Smile’ Movie
Dec. 8th, 2025 09:00 pmRead Sounds Like The Next ‘Smile’ Movie
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Manager: "We’ve implemented a policy where everyone has to smile at customers all the time, in an effort to encourage them to stay inside the store."
Supervisor: "Uh, manager, that’s the exact policy we use at closing time to get them OUT of the store."
Bundle of Holding: Forged 3
Dec. 8th, 2025 02:53 pm
The third array of recent standalone tabletop roleplaying games using the Forged in the Dark rules system based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio.
Bundle of Holding: Forged 3
A Sandmeyer Replacement
Dec. 8th, 2025 01:16 pmI enjoyed reading this new synthetic paper, because I can still remember when I learned about the good ol’ Sandmeyer reaction in sophomore organic chemistry class and these authors are among the many people trying to replace it.
There’s a reason for that, because while the Sandmeyer is definitely old, it ain’t always good. It’s a reaction that lets you take an aromatic amine (of which there are a great many) and convert that amino group into a wide variety of others, which is in theory extremely useful. It goes back to 1884 (!), and a lot of people don’t realize that its discovery was more or less accidental. Traugott Sandmeyer (you don’t run into many Traugotts these days) was trying to do an arylamine coupling, for sure, by first converting the amine into a reactive benzenediazonium chloride salt. But when he brought in his coupling partner (copper acetylide) he didn’t get a new bond between the aryl ring and the acetylene - instead, he got chlorobenzene, because the chloride counterion hopped in there instead.
That’s because those aryldiazoniums are pretty lively creatures. A constant theme of the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts here is the yearning that polynitrogen compounds have to turn into nitrogen gas, and that’s just what happens here. A diazonium salt just needs the lightest push to have its two nitrogen atoms bubble away as N2 gas, leaving an extremely reactive aryl radical behind. In practice, copper salts are the classic way to run the reaction, because the copper decomposes the diazonium readily (and forms a reactive arylcopper species as an intermediate). I was taken with the reaction because of the way it was drawn in our textbook - an arylamine at the center of the diagram, with arrows radiating out from it as it transformed into an aryl chloride, aryl bromide, a phenol, an aryl nitrile, etc. It looked kind of magical, because up until then I had thought of these things are sort of separate orders of things - it was like watching some sort of amazing farm animal that could give birth to fish, frogs, or birds depending on what you fed it. I wanted to go run one right then!
Variations of the reaction will bring in a fluorine or a trifluoromethyl group and allow for some other types of coupling reactions as well. So you might imagine that Sandmeyers just get used all the time, but ’tis not the case. Those aryldiazonium salts are just too touchy and hazardous, especially on scale, and especially if you have fantasies about making a big batch and storing it in a flask to turn it into whatever you want to later on. Don’t try that! The reaction can be run industrially, but only with extremely careful attention to detail, and there have been many injuries (and even fatalities) over the years, some of which are detailed here. In general, the less you handle or concentrate the diazonium salt the better off you'll be, but there are no guarantees.
There have naturally been many attempts to improve on this situation, and the new paper linked above summarizes several of them. But their new method seems like it might be more general than most, assuming that your starting material can tolerate nitration conditions. That’s because you take the arylamine and make an N-nitro derivative of it, and this can be made to kick out an OH after tautomerization and make a very labile NNO derivative that leaves as gaseous nitrous oxide in a pretty direct analogy to the Sandmeyer being driven by loss of nitrogen. A big difference, though, is that all of this happens in the same pot in situ - you start with the arylamine and isolate the coupling product, with no isolation or handling of any of the intermediates. Mechanistically, this one also looks much more like an aryl cation intermediate than an aryl radical.
The authors demonstrate this across a very wide range of substrates, including a lot of heterocyclic amines where the classic Sandmeyer doesn’t perform well, and they bring in halides, thiocyanates, OH, O-tosyl, O-triflate and a number of other coupling partners, including some intramolecular C-C bond forming reactions. They also demonstrate one-pot procedures to take some of these on to now-traditional metal-catalyzed couplings of many types, which gives you a lot of versatility in a synthetic sequence.
If the calorimetric profiles look good, this reaction could be quite useful on a larger scale - I’m sure that there will be some process chemists taking a look at that to make sure that the nitration step and the subsequent loss of nitrous oxide don’t present possible thermodynamic hazards. On the bench scale, though, this looks a lot more doable than the Sandmeyer, which as a reaction may be headed into the History of Organic Chemistry department and leaving the Useful Laboratory Transformations one. And to be honest, it was always an uneasy member of that second group anyway!
Five Freshly Reprinted SFF Books and Series
Dec. 8th, 2025 02:08 pm
Did you miss these books the first time around? Good news!
Five Freshly Reprinted SFF Books and Series
They’re The Biggest Tool In Construction
Dec. 8th, 2025 06:55 pmRead They’re The Biggest Tool In Construction
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I used to work at a small construction company. Our old boss’ nephew (who was forty-eight years old) worked with us and generally made everyone’s lives miserable.
He complained about EVERYTHING constantly. Always angry.
UnCONventional Started 16 Years Ago
Dec. 8th, 2025 04:08 pm


I’ve included the first and last comics here for comparison.
UnCONventional is the first time I really focused down on what I needed to write and finish a story. Updating that every week helped me find the discipline to really chart out arcs, understand my limitations, and how to use those limitations to my advantage. It’s such an inside-baseball comic, where I know it’s not really accessible to folks who are outside of the convention scene, but it’s the reason why the more broadly appealing stuff I do works at all.
I learned all of those lessons while writing that weird, incredibly niche comic.
These days I’m writing novels, a new comic, and GMing actual play shows — but my ability to tell a story over a long term arc was honed and perfected in that silly little semi-autobiographical comic about nerds running a convention in a college town. It’s nice to remember what it was. Even when it was bad, it made me better at what I’m doing now.
And I think that’s neat.
Addressing The Messes Of The Masses
Dec. 8th, 2025 05:00 pmRead Addressing The Messes Of The Masses
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Boss: "Why do your closing duties always take so long?"
Me: "I do the fitting rooms. You do realize how messy the customers leave those, right?"
Boss: "Well, you need to figure something out because I can't keep waiting on you."
Seeing as my boss never ventures close to the fitting rooms anyway, and I was left to figure it out, I came up with something.
Books Received, November 29 — December 5
Dec. 8th, 2025 10:20 am
Six works new to me: four fantasy, one horror, and one SF (also ttrpg). Four are arguably series.
Books Received, November 29 — December 5
Which of these look interesting?
New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 5 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (15.8%)
New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 6 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (15.8%)
New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 7 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
2 (10.5%)
Black River Ruby by Jean Cottle (January 2026)
6 (31.6%)
The Flowers of Algorab by Nils Karlén, Kosta Kostulas, and Martin Grip (January 2026)
7 (36.8%)
Headlights by C J Leede (June 2026)
2 (10.5%)
Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)
Cats!
15 (78.9%)
I Think, Therefore I Squat
Dec. 8th, 2025 02:30 pmRead I Think, Therefore I Squat

My gym has one squat rack. I reach it at the same time as another guy.
Guy: "We can alternate sets?"
Seems fair, so we start. I realise what was initially a kind gesture was just a way for him to entrap me into his motivational personal training.
Guy: "The squat is the foundation of physicality. You descend into your fears and then rise with purpose."




