HSU IT Department

Well, it's been a long time...

2025-12-30T20:04:58Z

Three years almost to the day since I posted. Not sure who's even still around here, but for anyone who still is, Happy Nondenominational Winter Holiday! It's snowing like crazy, I'm on the sofa with a cat, a glass of wine, and "Extras" streaming on BritBox, so life in my house and immediate surroundings is good. Unlike life in the US in general which is becoming increasingly nasty, brutish, and short, thanks to the prevalence of ignorant ideologues, misogynistic morons, and general judicial jackassery. But we won't go there. We will stick to cats, wine, and British comedy, yes? Yes :)

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Happy Robot Uprising! Er...Christmas!

2022-12-27T22:32:10Z

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.

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It's that time of year again...

2022-12-24T02:07:20Z

...for my favorite holiday song video!

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

2022-12-18T18:30:12Z

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 :)

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Ways to help

2022-03-03T03:27:12Z

If you have been looking for something you can do to help with the heart-breaking tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, here are two good options:

World Central Kitchen is a major player in providing food to displaced people.

https://wck.org/
https://donate.wck.org/give/393234#!/donation/checkout

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières is also working to set up teams in neighboring countries - Poland, Romania, Slovakia, etc.

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/countries/ukraine

It may not seem like much, but every little bit helps and these two organizations are solid ones that will make good use of funds. See their rankings on CharityNavigator for more information: DWB/MSF and World Central Kitchen

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Humanity i love you

2022-02-25T02:14:35Z

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

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Free books!

2022-01-09T00:42:35Z

Yes, it's time again for the Great January Book Giveaway! These are all books I've weeded from my shelves that need a new home with loving ~~parents~~ readers. Claim the one(s) you want in the comments, first person to claim gets it. Feel free to ask for as many as you like :)

Updated 1/9

Title	Author	Genre
House Lessons	Erica Bauermeister	memoir
Staying On	Paul Scott	fiction
~~The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory~~	~~Jennifer Heath~~	~~non-fiction~~
Rage	Bob Woodward	politics (Trump)
~~The Sum of Us~~	~~Heather McGee~~	~~politics, economics, race relations~~
~~Little House in the Suburbs~~	~~Deanna Caswell~~	~~non-fiction~~
Clear and Present Danger	Tom Clancy	fiction
~~Dracula: The Undead~~	~~Dacre Stoker~~	~~fiction (**audiobook, on 12 CDs)~~
~~Complete Book of Furniture Repair and Refinishing~~	~~Ralph Kinney~~	~~non-fiction~~
A History of Wild Places	Shea Earnshaw	fiction
Natural Cleaning for Your Home	Casey Kellar	non-fiction
Brain Droppings	George Carlin	humor
Darkfall, Phantoms, Servants of Twilight	Dean Koontz	horror (3 in 1 volume)
Treasury of Fantasy	Carey Wilkens (editor)	fantasy
6 pb romance novels (all basically the same lol)	Barbara Cartland	cheesy romance
Red Death	P N Elrod	vampires
~~Wolf Hall~~	~~Hilary Mantel~~	~~historical fiction~~
~~Bring Up the Bodies~~	~~Hilary Mantel~~	~~historical fiction~~
The Good Life	Helen and Scott Nearing	nature/memoir
The Forstye Saga vol. 1, In Chancery	John Galsworthy	fiction
The Family	Mario Puzo	fiction
The Martian	Andy Weir	sci-fi
The White Hotel	D M Thomas	fiction (seriously weird)
The Fabulous Riverboat	Philip Jose Farmer	sci-fi
Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern	Anne McCaffrey	sci-fi
Educational Games for Fun	Margaret Mulac	non-fiction
Tom Brown's School Days	Thomas Hughes	fiction (v. old hc, early 1900s)
~~Complete Book of Composting~~	~~Rodale Books~~	~~non-fiction~~
Organic Plant Protection	Rodale Books	non-fiction

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Starting on a goal

2022-01-02T20:36:15Z

::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 )

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Jan 1, 2022

2022-01-02T20:11:17Z

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A briliant light hidden in all the forms you see

2021-07-04T18:55:26Z

"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

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We're all in this together

2021-04-04T21:29:06Z

There ain't no good guy,
there ain't no bad guy,
There's only you and me
and we may disagree...

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delphipsmith @ 2021-01-09T09:16:00

2021-01-09T14:22:23Z

+---+---+---+---+---+---+-
Moderation isn't an end point, or even a center point,
necessarily. Rather than a template, it is an approach,
a tone, a cock of the head, an open mind, a willing ear,
an unjaundiced eye. A moderate wonders what other facts
might be brought to bear. A moderate figures we're in
this together and believes that a meeting of the minds
is not tantamount to surrender.
-- Kathleen Parker, "American Id-eology"
+---+---+---+---+---+---+-

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Have yourself a Hoggy Warty Christmas

2020-12-26T18:49:30Z

I hope everyone is having a safe, relaxing winter holiday, despite its being not at all what we would have expected a year ago. If you're looking for an excellent way to pass some time, hoggywartyxmas is now posting and once again the stories are a true delight -- original, creative, well-written, and jolly good fun. Madam Malkin has a starring role in several of the offerings posted thus far, including a lovely exchange of letters with Madam Pince in which both young witches are finding their professional feet, as it were. The description of the National Library of Magic is bewitching :) If you haven't yet visited, now is the time!

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My good deed for the day

2020-10-25T00:07:26Z

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

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Fly, (and help us) be free!!!

2020-10-17T17:36:01Z

Today I mailed my letters for Vote Forward!! Mine were 110 out of more than 16 million letters sent, encouraging folks to participate in the election and vote, vote, vote -- check out all the photos :)

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I couldn't have said it better

2020-09-25T22:17:47Z

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

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Right?

2020-08-29T16:29:31Z

[Credit: The Shovel]

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"the black body not as a site of death but as a site of magic"

2020-08-08T14:37:42Z

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...

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About that LiveJournal password...

2020-05-27T13:11:58Z

"...a file of 26 million accounts containing usernames, email addresses, and passwords that allegedly were taken from LiveJournal at some point several years ago...information in this file has been available on the black market since at least October of 2018... the person(s) [may have] obtained the data in 2014..."

Read full announcement ==>

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Birds!!!

2020-05-02T15:52:45Z

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?

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Walpurgisnacht* entertainment

2020-04-30T21:08:22Z

If you're looking for something to do this evening, a panel of eight horror authors will be doing live readings from their books! It's at 6pm EST tonight, go here to find out more:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/indie-horrorthon-1--/register

* Saint Walpurga, whose nacht this is, was hailed by the Christians of Germany for battling "pest, rabies and whooping cough" which seems rather appropriate at this moment. Her thoughts on injecting disinfectant are, alas, unknown.

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Go ye and claim, and miscellaneous news

2020-04-29T17:19:25Z

Prompt claiming is still open over at sshg_promptfest! It took me forever to narrow down my choices but I've finally picked one. I'm delighted to see that one of my own prompts has been claimed -- my favorite one, in fact -- so yay for that. Go browse, see if something sparks your fancy!

In other news...

Last week we went for a walk and three tiny ponies were roaming the neighbor's yard and munching his grass. We haven't seen them again since, so we don't know if they were (a) pets, (b) a new method of lawn-mowing, or (c) a marauding band of miniature wild mustangs, descended from the hills now that there's no traffic. I keep hearing that wildlife is encroaching into deserted cities, so you never know. I suppose it's also possible that they were (d) a hallucination. We haven't been getting out much.

Yesterday I made banana muffins for the first time! I make banana bread often, but this time Mr Psmith requested muffins. I had meant to put chocolate chips in half of them (because CHOCOLATE, amirite?) but I forgot. Fortunately, I remembered that one Seinfeld episode, so when they came out of the oven, all warm and smelling like pure heaven, I carefully took off the tops of two of them, inserted a few chips (ok, more than a few) (ok, a LOT), and put the top back on. They are DELISH.

Our chickens are out of the house and into their coop in the side yard. They seem deeply suspicious of the little ladder leading from the chickenhouse part down into the fenced run, but we are in hopes their natural curiosity will tempt them out eventually. I kind of miss their little "cheep cheep cheep" coming from the other room, but I can't wait to have our very own eggs. Mr Psmith wants to get goats so we can make our own feta, but I have drawn A Very Firm Line at that. At least for now...

Oh, and POTUS is still a brainless moron. By now that's not really news, though, is it?

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Security breach / email threat PSA

2020-04-22T16:53:14Z

In case anyone reading this was not already aware, in March there was a security breach at DreamWidth and a number of user names and passwords were compromised (DW announcement here). Per their instructions, I immediately changed my DW password and also my LJ and AO3 passwords. Recently I got an email that correctly stated my (former) DW password, and then threatened various actions unless they got money (bitcoin) from me. Since that password is no longer valid, and I'm not concerned about the nonsense threats, I've deleted the email and don't intend to do anything.

BUT it's proof that the stolen data has been shared, and that my account was one of the ones compromised. So, if you have not yet changed your DW password, you should do so immediately, and if you use that same password on any other social media or other accounts, you should change those also, to something different.

Edit: FYI, what I got was one of these extortion emails. Annoying but basically toothless nonsense. If you get one too, don't sweat it :)

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These are a few (ok, two) of my favorite things

2020-04-13T19:43:25Z

I love both these guys.

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But what if I can't?

2020-04-08T13:40:14Z

This quote from Bridget Jones' Diary has been running through my head:

It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas [or, in this case, Corona-mas] with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds.

It may be due to the fact that this was my breakfast:

(click to embiggen cake)

I hope, when we all go back to work, I remember how...

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