questionoftheday | Member Posts

Youtube's new 18+ restriction thing

If you haven't heard: Youtube's gonna be rolling out a thing where they use AI to analyze the types of videos you watch to determine whether or not you're 18. If they think you're under, they're probably gonna limit what kinds of videos you can watch, and if they think you're 18 or over, you're gonna have to provide your ID. And if at any point Youtube has your age wrong, you're gonna have to provide some sort of ID anyways to rectify it.

I hate it all. Some people have posited that this being put in place is to protect kids, which on it's face sounds like a good thing. But having to give your ID to some online company, and Google no less... Not too long ago there was already another incident where an app intended for women only had it's database leaked, resulting in the leakage of several IDs (because this app used IDs to prove that its users were indeed women, a practice I have my own thoughts about).

Evil, but hardly a surprise. So, think about how much you enjoy using YouTube, and if you start hitting barriers there, consider whether there is an alternative that would be less abusive.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is sunny and mild, a beautiful day. :D

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

I took a few pictures around the yard.

.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Here is my card for the Crime Classics Bingo fest over in

allbingo. The fest runs from August 1-31. (See all my 2025 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.

CRIME CLASSICS BINGO CARD

Excellent Intentions	Somebody at the Door	Still Waters	In Captivity	My Aunt
Underground	A Bookseller	On the Riviera	Family Matters	Not to Be Taken
In White	As If By Magic	WILD CARD	Before the Fact	The Village
A Lady	Settling Scores	He Who Whispers	Deep Waters	Silent Nights
The Black Spectacles	Someone from the Past	In the Basement	The Man Who Didn’t Fly	A Busybody

Current Mood: busy

daryl_wor

And Last night's episode was The Crooked Man with... Uncle Stephen from As Time Goes By...

much less wind-baggy...

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Memory Lane
Current Music: Conan Doyle

taichara

taichara — 9:50 AM
so far tonight/the weekend is looking like [Deathscythe] Hell and me picking at sailormoon, I better make sure to add Mario and old FF stuff to round out the time travel

captain_phil

Only one in my department at work today.

zhelana

Progress This Month

Exercise every day in 2025
Weight lift every day of 2025
Brush teeth 360 times in 2025
Shower weekly 2025
Art Every Day 2025
Paint 12 times in 2025
Write in Spanish every day of 2025
Write in Russian every week of 2025
Finish my memoirs
Write 300k words in 2025
Write weekly 2025
Work through a book of writing exercises
Read 2 pages of Spanish every day 2025
Read 12 new fiction titles 2025
Clean 2 minutes per weekday 2025
Clean 10 minutes per week 2025
Cook 12 times 2025
Watch a video in Spanish every week 2025
Watch a video in Russian every week 2025
Read 3 science textbooks
Read 3 social science textbooks
Read 3 history textbooks
Work through 3 math textbooks
Read 12 new nonfiction titles 2025

Finished This Month

Go on a cruise
Go to Scotland
Go to Ireland

ysabetwordsmith

Sunshine Revival: Sunset

You might also choose to write your own wrap-up post for the Sunshine Revival. It's not an official challenge, but consider it a bit of a bonus prompt:

Which challenges did you participate in? Did you find any new journals to follow? Did you learn anything, either about yourself or someone else? How did you feel this month? Maybe leave a note for your future self reminding them of the little, everyday memories that sometimes get blurred out with the passage of time

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Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This week's theme is House.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

conuly

This should drop the temperature to something livable.

E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.

First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.

I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.

Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.

The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.

At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)

One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.

And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.

*****************

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ysabetwordsmith

Today we went to the Effingham County Fair.

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Current Mood: happy

conuly

What even is this fucking bullshit

Go leave a public comment, though I don't even know what to say. "This is garbage and you know it, and you're bad and should feel bad", maybe.

stonepicnicking_okapi

Word Count for July: 14,628

Writing:

1. I participated in the Sunshine Challege.
2. 2 poems
3. Kept the soap opera going.

In August:

1. Keep the soap opera going.
2. Catch up on poems.
3. Get back to doing fills for comms.

Reading: 7 books. 4 of these were Mother Son book club books. 1 was an Agatha Christie.

In August:

1. Complete the bingo.
2. Read The Clocks.
3. Finish The Hound of the Baskerville for Sherlock Sunday.

Crafting: 7 spreads and 4 cards. 1 jigsaw puzzle.

The boys and their father are going to be gone for 4 days in August and I'm planning a time of lots of reading, collaging, planning and working on craft projects, and at least one jigsaw.

Fitness:

1. 16 days of Yoga with Adriene. She's still the only yogi I like.

In August:

1. I need to sign us up for the Turkey Trot (Thanksgiving) and work on getting my 5k faster. Since the job started, I have started doing my long runs on either Saturday (preferred before the weekly shopping, as early as I can haul my fat ass out of bed) or Sunday morning. I try to get there before the running groups start their stampedes.
2. I want to read up on some forearm/hand stretches to improve the pain in my left arm/elbow area. Back stretches wouldn't go amiss either.
3. I'm down 5 lbs. but of course that's up 4 lbs from 1 Jan.

Personal:

1. Survived leak #2 without sleeping in the car or fleeing to a motel.
2. Got a job! Started working! Dealt with being a working mom! Got a paycheck!
3. I managed to get all of Minor's paperwork (physical, birth certificate, forms, etc.) to run cross country in high school uploaded.
5. Did decently with picking out my sister's birthday gifts this year.
6. Got 90% of Minisculus' school supplies and ordered two whole sets of dress clothes for the boys without losing my sanity.
7. Played 2 new-to-us games: 2 EXIT games and Canvas.
7a. Took the kids to the pool twice.
8. Said goodbye to a very old, very dear friend (okapi car). I'm still crying about this. I don't know when I'll stop.

halfshellvenus

HalfshellHusband is off getting his pacemaker replaced, which means he's outlived it! Cause for celebration. It's there mainly as a defibrillator, since he had a blackout about 10 years ago that we've never known the cause of. Probably low blood pressure, but better safe than sorry.

Our son finished taking the California Bar Exam yesterday. Boy, is he glad to be through with that. Ideally forever, though we won't know until early November. But for now... massive brain purge! And sleeping. So much sleeping.

Now I'm trying to plan a vacation for August for the 3 of us, before our son starts work in September. Running into some resistance from The Boy, because he's reluctant to leave the cat with a sitter for very long. Which I don't think is ideal, either, but this will be his last hurrah, and the cat will survive. Even with the enticement of Hawaii, it'll be an uphill battle. \o?

For my Idol story this week, I used a fairytale setting with the chance to skewer some of the weirdnesses fairy tales always seem to contain. In particular, there was a reference to Froggie Went A' Courtin', which I know as a song but it's older than that. Obviously, Bob Dylan's version is not the one I'm familiar with, but the lyrics match. Can't remember the original context, though. I know we had a record album that had some children's songs on it, so it might have been on there? The only one I definitely remember was along the lines of "Marisu, Marisu, cook some pierogies." Have I mentioned lately how repetitive children's songs tend to be?

About to go biking on another hot day. There was a reprieve last week (highs only in the low to upper 80s!), but it came with a lot of wind. This week? I'm grateful for the days that are ONLY in the low 90s. Summer in Sacramento--ugh.

stonepicnicking_okapi

This bingo card was created by

kingstoken. More about the challenge here: https://kingstoken.dreamwidth.org/109837.html

POC Author: On Junteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed. This is a slim book of 5 essays, and four of them are not about Junteenth, they are about the history of African Americans in Texas. The author is an excellent historian and researcher. I started her book on The Hemmings family (Thomas Jefferson's slave family) but gave up after about 25%. It was good but very dense.

Classic/Retelling: Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. This is the story of a pig who befriends a spider who saves the pig from being butchered. [I am also trying to do as many squares as I can of

garonne's 2025 Book Bingo here: https://garonne.dreamwidth.org/58219.html so I think this qualifies as G-O-2: with a bird on the cover. There is a goose.]

Free Space: Holes by Louis Sachar. This is part of the mother-son book club and won the Newberry award. It's the story of a boy who gets sent to a brutal reform camp which is basically a work camp to try to dig up a lost treasure in the desert. Clever plot. It doesn't quite go where you think it's going. And there are clever elements. [I think this qualifies for Garonne's G-G-5: Started reading without knowing anything about it. Even the cover doesn't give much away.]

With a Woman Protagonist: I am assuming girls count for this. Rain Reign is another mother-son book club book about a girl with Asperger's and a dog she gets and loses. Also about her alcoholic father and the girl's homonym fixation.

Set Somewhere You've Been: Death in Zanzibar by M. M. Kaye is sort of like Bridget Jones goes to Zanzibar and gets caught up in a mystery. Very blah. Some local color, as they say, but it wasn't anything to get excited about.
---

Books for the last squares are in progress so I should complete it by the end of August.

daryl_wor

Watched The Naval Treaty last night and husband VERY entertained the dubious fiancé's brother is none other than BLAKE from Blake's 7

and I shall keep wondering if Percy Phelps ever GOT his damn coffee....

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Memory Lane
Current Music: Conan Doyle

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and mild.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus a pair of house wrens.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 7/31/25 -- I did some work around the patio.

EDIT 7/31/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/31/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

A few fireflies are out. I saw a bat.

As it is now dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

We made it to the end of July! \o/ If you have completed some of your medium-term goals or subgoals, and/or you're still chugging away at your ongoing goals, then pat yourself on the back. You worked hard for that. We're now most of the way through summer. If you're doing seasonal goals, hopefully you have made good progress on the summer batch.

This year I'm trying something new, continuing to track goals at the end of each month. So far it seems to be helping, so that's encouraging. I'm looking at my goal list more often and trying to keep ticking off more of them. The main drawback is that this update becomes more of a chore each month.

These are the previous check in posts:
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 4
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 10
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 17
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 24
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In February 28
New Year's Resolutions Check In March 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In April 30
New Year's Resolutions Check In May 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In June 30

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Current Mood: accomplished

ysabetwordsmith

I made blackout on my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo Fest. \o/

B1 (Bad Girls) -- "Provoking Change by Bringing Nature" (standalone)
B2 (Close-knit Community) -- "Incompetence, Sloppy Thinking, and Laziness" (Frankenstein's Family)
B3 ("Put me down!") -- "A Stronger Woman" (Polychrome Heroics: Fortressa)
B4 ("I tried being reasonable. I didn't like it.") -- "The Pleasure of Escaping the Responsibility" (One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis)
B5 (Black Hats / White Hats) -- "Upholding It, Wherever Found" (Polychrome Heroics)

I1 (Resist Oppression) -- "Happy Instruments of Salvation" (Peculiar Obligations)
I2 ("He's all hat and no cattle") -- "No Such Thing as Finished" (Polychrome Heroics)
I3 (Dodge) -- "A New Twist" (LIFC)
I4 (Firefly) -- "Something Elusive and Mysterious" (standalone)
I5 (I'll Get My Revenge) -- "The Well-being of All Our People" (Clay of Life)

N1 ("The Wayward Wind") -- "Maho Shoujo" (standalone)
N2 (Buffalo) -- "Legs of Grass, Feet of Flowers" (standalone)
N3 (WILD CARD: Clean Up the Town) -- "Indicative of the Extent" (Polychrome Heroics: The Big One)
N4 (Defenestration) -- "In Effigy" (Frankenstein's Family)
N5 (Independent Woman) -- "But an Empty Shell" (Polychrome Heroics)

G1 (The Harder They Fall) -- "Always Surprised by Consequences" (Polychrome Heroics)
G2 ("Cool Water") -- "Beautiful, Damn Hard, Increasingly Useful" (Polychrome Heroics: Kraken)
G3 (Redemption Story) -- "The Future by Consequence, the Past by Redemption" (Frankenstein's Family)
G4 (Immigrant) -- "Fed from So Many Sources" (Frankenstein's Family)
G5 (Sunrise / Sunset) -- "Strong, Competent, Capable" (Frankenstein's Family)

O1 (Captive / Slave) -- "Four Marks of True Repentence" (Polychrome Heroics)
O2 (Gambling) -- "Finding the Gold in the Spirit" (Polychrome Heroics: Shiv)
O3 (Silver / Gold) -- "The Bee Tree's Gift" (standalone)
O4 (Horse) -- "Nuwneek" (The Bear Tunnels)
O5 (Emotionally Constipated Man) -- "New and Innovative Approaches" (Polychrome Heroics: The Big One)

Current Mood: accomplished

stonepicnicking_okapi

Wednesday's word is...

...dolmen.

a megalithic tomb with a large flat stone laid on upright ones, found chiefly in Britain and France.

---

I found it in the new detective novel I'm reading Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann.

Othello disappeared into the shadow of the dolmen near the place where George lay pinned to the ground by the spade.

[Note: Othello is a sheep]

dolmen

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question of the day

Member Posts

Cyberspace Theory

Birdfeeding

Crime Classics Bingo Card 8-1-25

1 August 2025 Friday

a good summary

Wish me luck!

Goal Checking

Sunshine Revival: Sunset

Follow Friday 8-1-25: House

Oh thank goodness, it's storming

Today's Adventures

PSA

The State of the Ficcery: July 2025

It's a red-letter day...

Book Bingo 2025: July

31 July 2025 Thursday

Birdfeeding

New Year's Resolutions Check In

Bingo

Word: Dolmen

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July 2019

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