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trobadora posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sid_guardian
Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]
Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)
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marchmetamatterschallenge writing prompt was "How do you define genres? Is it still a useful tool to find entertainment you like, or have offerings become so niche and melded that it's hard to use categories anymore? Was it ever something useful for you, personally?"Want to leave a Kudos?
Mar. 27th, 2026 08:58 pmprisca posting in fic_promptlyGosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'
No, sir, not in the least.
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This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.
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Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:
A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.
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Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:
Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.
This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.
goddess47 posting in no_true_pairno_true_pair March 27th - Hermione Granger & Severus Snape with the title "Empty"![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
snopes_feedshuufleur93 posting in no_true_pair
snopes_feed
snopes_feedI've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.
This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.
Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.
The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.
If you'd like to read more, then this is quite good.
(And apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about the weather for any appalling mistakes I've made.)
trobadora in sid_guardian - Guardian Reverse Exchange sign-ups: three hours left!conuly - I finally caught up on Only Murders in the Buildingtamaranth - 2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculiayourlibrarian - Feeling the Ughprisca in fic_promptly - Friday, March 27 - Queen Song Titles and Quotesoursin - Friday miscgoddess47 in no_true_pair - Empty (Harry Potter; Hermione Granger, Severus Snape)snopes_feed - Did Trump mistake White House patio umbrellas for Iranian officials?badly_knitted in get_knitted - Check-In Post - March 27th 2026shuufleur93 in no_true_pair - (Not So) Empty (Younger (TV), Josh & Maggie Amato)yourlibrarian in common_nature - Late Bloomer Sunsetsnopes_feed - Does video show Trump saying Iran asked him to be supreme leader? We inspectedysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeedingysabetwordsmith - Birdfeedingforestofglory - Media Roundup: Awesome Girls!conuly - And my Robert Moses counter increments up yet again!lucy_roman in drabble_zone - Inspector George Gently: Challenge #494 Rest: Away Daycyberghostface in scans_daily - DC Comics Presents #41snopes_feed - Does this video show 7 dogs in China escaping illegal transport truck, walking home?andrewducker - Behold - The Polar Vortex!chiming
