HSU IT Department

Somewhere, deep in their little robot brains, they are thinking, "Yay! We get to play!!"

Or perhaps, "THE HUMANS WILL PAY FOR THIS..." It's hard to say.

I do still exist!

I've been almost entirely absent from LJ/DW for the past year for a variety of reasons, most connected with family matters, which has meant I have had to carefully ration my mental and emotional capital so as to be able to deal with all the things that needed dealing with. Some of the things had an ending but left us working through the aftermath; others have subsided for the time being or even faded away; one will, I fear, extend the unwanted stress-testing into January. But it has, without question, been a tough year at the Psmith household.

That said, I'm definitely feeling better/a little more myself as the year draws to a close, and am hopeful that 2023 will be the Year of Living Normally again. As part of that I aim to be back here more regularly, because I've missed y'all. I spent today getting caught up with mywitch's always-delightful annual 25 Days of Christmas artfest, and am looking forward to hoggywartyxmas (surely the rumor it will be the last is, in fact, only a rumor??) and snapecase.

I hope all of you have a relaxing holiday filled with pleasant people, comfortable surroundings, good fellowship, and delicious noshes and sips :)

Since March of 2020, I feel like I have done nothing but grieve, in so many different directions and for so many different reasons.  None of them go away, they just pile one upon another.  There were (and still are) those who are afraid and uncertain about Covid; those who are sick, or dying, or losing loved ones; those who are trying valiantly to do their jobs and are being berated, abused, and threatened.  There were (and still are) media figures in positions of trust and responsibility who are failing, utterly, to do their duty to provide their fellow citizens with facts.  There were (and still are) people whose personal ambitions are eating away at the very foundations of our democracy.  There were (and still are) people who want to deny the past, without grasping that they are thereby endangering out future.  There were (and still are) people who are so consumed by fear that they would rather destroy than understand.  There were (and still are) people who are sucked in by lies and misinformation and conspiracy theories, and led to do foolish and hurtful things.  There were (and still are) Black men and women who are disrespected, threatened, injured, and killed by those who swore an oath to protect and serve.  There were (and still are) women who are being denied control over their own bodies.  There were (and still are) people who want nothing more than the freedom of self-determination who are being threatened and invaded and killed.

As a historian, I know that this too shall pass.  As a human being, I am always just thisclose to tears.


Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you.

E. E. Cummings

::waves at lovely online friends who are still here after all this time::

One of my goals for 2022 is to get back into writing, here on LJ/DW and in RL. (I posted all of three times in 2021, gah.) I'll try to get an update on My Life and Other Comedies posted sometime this week, but to kick things off I'm stealing a book-related meme from several other folks. Because who around here doesn't like talking about books, right?? Here are the questions:

1- What can you say about a book you are reading right now? Unfinished please, or at least recent.
-2- Who is the worst Mary Sue you've ever encountered in a book.
-3- Name a book series that you felt very entertained by.
-4- Name a book that challenged you and changed your Weltanschauung.
-5- Which book or series of books have you felt repulsed by?
-6- Are there any books you own more than one copy of? Name two if so.
-7- How often do you re-read books you've loved before? What are a few?
-8- Which authors have you read this year? A few will do.


( And here are my answers )

"Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having which you call ordinary everyday consciousness - pretending you're not it - that experience is exactly the same thing as ‘IT’. There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery.

"In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating a skinless drum, no light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything."

-- Alan Watts

Early voting started at ten am. We were there at 10:05 -- and so were about a hundred other people :)

Feel free to share this around. Let's make it a Thing.

A friend pointed me to this stunningly powerful and beautiful photography project, by Mikael Owunna. The name of the project comes from Chinua Achebe, but it also makes me think of Carl Sagan's famous quote, "We are made of star stuff."

'Every Black Person Deserves To See Themselves This Way'

It brought me to tears...

This morning my mom sent me a link to these many many live-stream bird cams!!! Eagles, condors, ospreys, owls, falcons, even a hummingbird on her tiny little nest. Since it's spring, many of them have eggs or live young right now. Man, I could watch this stuff all day long. (There are cams for the non-birders, too -- other categories on the site include bears, oceans, African savannah, animal sanctuaries, etc.)

Ain't nature wonderful?