chickenfeet

Sweetie has a vet appointment tomorrow. I think she's constipated; she is peeing (including on the back room rug, which I sprayed peroxide on after mopping it up), but not passing anything. She is not eating, though I think from the pee volume she is drinking water. And she is still mainly hiding behind stuff under the ancient (possibly post-colonial era fourth-hand) desk with the enormous 92-year-old sort-of-easy-chair that is hard to move). Since she is able to get up and walk well enough, I will slide down the front of the chair under the desk tomorrow and try to move her, which will make her get up and walk out, where Steve can grab her.

My throat is okay now. Maybe something is going around? A one-day sore throat that vanishes?

oursin

"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker:

London is being used as the backdrop for inaccurate viral videos that reach enormous audiences around the world by playing into the worst stereotypes about the capital.

This was an investigation into one man who was doing this thing:

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.
“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.
That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”
At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”
....
The TikToker appears to have no concept of the potential real-world impact of his uploads, instead considering everything in terms of view counts and pieces of content.

So he made fake videos about immigrants being housed in prime properties, to which he had access through his job.

He had originally found he could make money through posting videos on TikTok but 'TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them'.

There seems to be just a total disconnect going on in the guy's mind (or he's just ethically vacuous) and generally he does not appear the sharpest blade in the drawer:

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded.... insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

He's also

baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.
“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”

As if people aren't doing this sort of thing all the time.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Mozart: Symphony No. 40

chickenfeet

Tennessee Williams at Crow's Theatre

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/02/12/summer-and-smoke-and-synchronicity/

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: indescribable

oursin

Happy birthday,

lenores_raven and

lindra!

naraht

Still haven't seen Heated Rivalry but I glanced at one of the books in a bookstore last night, and realised that I had the characters backwards! Based on pictures, I'd assumed that the dark-haired one was Ilya Rozanov and the ginger one was Shane Hollander. I'd figured that Rozanov was part Kazakh (or could well have been part Korean, like Viktor Tsoi) – but the guy who actually turns out to be playing Rozanov doesn't look Slavic to me at all. I can only see him as having a severe case of ~~American~~ Canadian Actor Face. This has been an interesting collision of racial assumptions.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3206/

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

https://xkcd.com/3206/

princessofgeeks

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conuly

How much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.

And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?
Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.

And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.

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

Link

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/02/11/deception-and-delusion-in-the-copperbelt/

conuly

What the hell sort of question is that? Of course I'd pay up! I have money, pride, and my teeth, and of the three, I can least afford to lose the last. Wouldn't almost anybody submit to the shakedown? That's how protection rackets work, after all - everybody does the same math and comes to the same conclusion as I just did.

(Of course, the context was "I think this company was rude to me over the phone, therefore I decided to live without hot water and heating because I have my principles" so, you know, I guess we have different approaches to life?)

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

( Read more... )

twistedchick

Sweetie, our 14-lb Kliban cat (dark gray and black tabby) hasn't been feeling well. She was upchucking yesterday, not furballs, and I think she may be allergic to the food. But this morning we couldn't find her at all -- looked downstairs and main floor -- until the SU located her in the most inaccessible place in the house: on the old shag rug under the desk in the library/not so spare room. There, she's under a large desk and blocked in by a large chair and neither of us are up to digging her out. She is reasonably alert, so we're waiting for her to emerge at some point. I've put out water for her, and food that I know she can eat (non fish). And now we wait.

Meanwhile, there's a gland at the top of my throat that is trying to decide if it's swollen or not.

oursin

What I read

Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.

I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.

Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.

I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.

On the go

Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.

Up next

I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: nostalgic

princessofgeeks

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sabotabby

Just finished: Changelog by Rich Larson. I don't have much to add from last week other than, surprise surprise, the last few stories were also amazing. One of the ones towards the end, "You Are Born Exploding," is probably the best one? I don't know which is the best one. It's about a mother whose young son is dying while increasing numbers of people in her seaside town are turning into zombie sea monsters, some of them voluntarily. Look, you can read it for free!

Sequel: An Anthology, edited by Chenise Puchailo. This collection is a sequel to Spud Publishing's first anthology, Debut (okay I find this, and everything about the press, very adorable, like a little middle finger in the face of SEO), and features six new authors and five new illustrators in Canadian genre fiction. I'm just really glad this exists, you guys. It gives me hope. It's like, very scrappy and indie and most of its focus is on the Prairies and interior BC, which is deeply underrepresented in fiction generally and in genre fiction even more so. It's not out yet but it should be launching in the spring.

Currently reading: The Threads That Bind Us by Robin Wolfe. Look, there are about six or seven of you who need to drop whatever you're doing and read this immediately. I'd have binged the entire thing in one night except that I felt like that wouldn't do it justice and I needed to slow down and read it in two nights instead.

This is a collection of twelve memories from queer and trans folks, written in their own words, which Robin then illustrates with symbolic embroidered textile art pieces (and a brief explanation of how the final embroidery relates to the story). It's devastating. The first story is about a teenager taking care of his leather daddy's friends who are dying of AIDS. There are moments of grief, love, and startling joy. It's the kind of thing where I just start directly texting friends who need to read it yesterday.

My only regret here is that the shipping somehow cost more than the book so I bought it in ebook form, which is probably actually better in terms of my seeing the details of the embroidery, but I'm sure the hard copy makes for a stunning physical artifact.

Anyway I am blown away so far and need you to read it so we can scream together.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: cheerful

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chickenfeet

Opera Ramblings - my idiosyncratic opinions on things operatic

February 2026

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Reading

updates of a sort

Does this qualify as banality of evil?

New Heated Rivalry fic: "How to Jump Off a Burning Bridge"

Summer and Smoke and synchronicity

sobbing

Interesting Links for 12-02-2026

(no subject)

Incorrect fandom osmosis

Installation

Montreal question

How Much? by Carl Sandburg

An everyday story of mining magnates

"Would you give money to a bully to keep him from beating you up every day?"

(no subject)

Wednesday is still not sleeping very well

So fun....

Heated Rivalry rec: CWs

Reading Wednesday

Interesting Links for 11-02-2026

Heated Rivalry rec

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February 2026

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