redbird | Reading

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/11/1/a-sea-otter-and-his-new-toy

Via Oregon Coast Aquarium, which writes:

Schuster wanted to show you his new Halloween toy that was donated from our Enrichment Wishlist 🎃 Thank you for the donation!

Interested in donating an enrichment item and creating specialized experiences? Learn more [at this link].

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/11/1/a-sea-otter-and-his-new-toy

Watch on YouTube

Available on Steam and Itch.io for the low low price of free:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240530/BABBDI/
https://lemaitre-bros.itch.io/babbdi

The description says it's a short game but I've spent over 10 hours happily wandering around in it and there's definitely more to do.

Immensely satisfying traversal and exploration of a brutalist concrete cityscape full of weird nooks and hidden places to discover, using a series of different movement tools (as well as your own ability to jump) -- including a baseball bat (hit a surface to propel yourself in the opposite direction, including hitting the ground to go UP), leaf blower, motorcycle, pickaxe (climb any vertical walls by jumping and stabbing the pickaxe in, then repeating) and propeller, all of which are enormous fun to use.

(You can only carry one tool at a time, but there are multiple iterations of them scattered around the map, and if you lose something, after a while -- possibly requiring quitting and reloading, not sure -- it'll tend to respawn where you originally found it.)

None of the platforming has required more co-ordination than I have; there are things I could undoubtedly do more easily if I was a better platformer, but finding the right tool can get me there anyway.

And if you can see somewhere, it's real and you can get there, and often you'll discover things to see or collect there. Maybe you'll crawl through a sewer and discover a secret underground dance party. Maybe you'll randomly run across a hidden room that looks at first glance like it's monitoring surveillance cameras but turns out on closer inspection to be running Windows on multiple microwaves. Even the invisible wall round what appears to be the edge of the map has a gap in it, and you can sneak through it to get to the ship you can see in the distance; it's not a skybox.

No fall damage, no ticking clock, no combat, no jumpscares. The vibe is ambient vaguely-dystopian melancholic creepiness, but within that people are going about their lives. I'm reminded of the origins of parkour in the neglected brutalist concrete environments of social housing in France.

Weird, relaxing, delightful.

(For anyone wondering, yes I am still very much playing Dark Souls, but I can only do so in moderate amounts per day, when I have mental energy, so I mix it up with other things too.)

Tags:

games

Read during yesterday's procedures, Nov. 3 New Yorker with an article by Larissa MacFarquhar on people with aphantasia, the inability to summon to mind mental images, typically from one's own memory. People with this condition tend to think of abstract representations of the concept instead, which can be an advantage when a specific personal memory would be a distraction from the topic, and they often have trouble in general recalling details of their own distant pasts.

I don't think I quite have this, but it is true that I'm not very visually oriented. During conversations with people, for instance, I am concentrating so tightly on the content of what's being said that my eyes are off in the middle distance, not looking closely at the people I'm talking with.

But what really caught my attention was the report that many such people can easily recall things that are spatial rather than visual - it appears to be an entirely different sort of memory classification - and some have a truly awesome ability to remember music. That's me. I have a solid ability to remember and analyze geographic direction pathways, I'm interested in architecture far more than in other visual arts, and I can remember works of music that I know almost, though not quite, as well as the one who can summon up a 45-minute summary of Verdi's Requiem by just thinking about it. I tend to fatigue over remembering long works by scratch, but during a performance I always know exactly what is coming next.

It's not just music, either. When I remember my deceased parents, the images that come to mind tend to be those in photographs rather than direct memory. But I can recall the sounds of their voices precisely. That's because I was listening to what they were saying rather than concentrating on looking at them.

Where do you sit on this scale?

I don't get many trick-or-treaters, but I made an offering!

( cut for photo )

23 trick-or-treaters this year, likely due to rain and construction. The last four were after we had started picking up and bringing things inside, and in fact after we'd sorted the candy into Keep and Share. (The Share candy stays outside overnight for the late crew, then goes with Belovedest to work. We don't have particularly much trouble with raccoons.) In the last party, the one with the umbrella hat and some sort of Studio Ghibli makeup (white face, red eye triangles) was enchanted with the glow sticks and picked one of the very few blue ones.

This year's innovation was doing the Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon thing with (much less cleverly timed) Chaos Emergency Doof Broadcast (Which is 4 hours of very silly DJ work), some of the Halloween episodes, with Addams Family Values on mute (several times through). We got the inflammable tango to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", and a few other silly confluences. I think this is one of the ones where precise timing doesn't help all that much, but it's great when it happens. By the time the show had run out of explicitly spooky songs, it got a little less entertaining.

Belovedest was Jigglypuff. I was a very tired Dulcie (wearing my own nightgown and some exhaustion makeup). I ordered the wrong crust on 2 out of 3 pizzas, and the 3rd one was gluten free.

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Read Clever Girl by Hannah McGregor, part of the Pop Classics series of bite-sized nonfiction/novella-length essays about whatever pop culture its contributors have childhood nostalgia for or otherwise find worth revisiting— this one, as you might guess, is about Jurassic Park. It's a little more self-serious than the other ones I've read (on Jennifer's Body and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games), with chapters subtitled things like "The Queer Erotics and Feminist Monstrosity of Velociraptors" and "Settler Colonialism, Dinosaur Ecology, and the Violence of Discovery"; I'm not entirely persuaded by all of McGregor's arguments for a queer, feminist reading of Jurassic Park, but that's what's great about movies, right? Different viewers get different things out of them, and for McGregor, it was a way of embracing one's sense of otherness and coping with grief.

Finished Stephenie Meyer's Twilight-from-Edward's-POV ~~official fanfic~~ rewrite, Midnight Sun, and I have some thoughts:
- This was definitely more interesting than original flavor Twilight, mostly because it's more overtly supernatural; in the original, Edward keeps insisting he's a dangerous monster who literally lusts for Bella's blood, but the reader mostly just sees him sparkle and run really fast.

( Read more... )

In other media, Florence + The Machine has a new album out, including a song about transforming into a kraken and eating the haters, so that was a Halloween treat.

Tags:

books

https://xkcd.com/3162/

After an embarrassingly long time of sporadically reminding myself that I specifically bought a tiny low-powered laptop explicitly for use down in the living room (and used her accordingly for a while, until the spring Dayjob crunch threw me out of the still-forming habit), I've finally got Haruna up and running again. Will this help me leave fewer tabs open, or just result in them being split among more places?

Happy Hallowe'en and blessed Samhain, as applicable! It's a quiet one here. The wind and rain were wild for much of the day, but did calm down in the late afternoon, as hoped. Reports from online locals indicate that a lot of people got way fewer trick-or-treaters than usual (if any), although some spots seemed to get normal levels.

We don't really know what our neighborhood "normal" is, either in the area in general or along our condo corp's road, since for the last few years we've just been setting out the candy and refilling as needed. Some or most of it has generally vanished, but that doesn't say much about numbers vs. the likelihood that at least a few kids take it by the fistful. But tonight

scruloose decided to actually answer the door and hand it out (in a hazmat suit, because why not?) and not a single kid came by during the window of time when they were down there. (That said, they got down there somewhat later than would probably have been ideal, and the doorbell did ring once before that point [and go unanswered, but all of our lights were off until

scruloose was ready]. So if we try it again next year, earlier might make a bit of difference.)

I've mostly been chilling on the main level with the cats, who've been barred from the ground floor for the evening. (We had the window open during that span of time when more kids might've been on the move out there, but I heard only the occasional young voice echoing over from the main road.) After finishing up at Dayjob for the day, I put on my Hallowe'en onesie, and

scruloose made the first hot cocoa of the season, and we finally finished listening to Fugitive Telemetry before dinner was made and

scruloose bagged up candy. (;_;)

I hope you're all having a fun/peaceful time of it.

Tags:

Posted by Kevin

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/927035321/0/loweringthebar~Okay-It-Seems-to-Have-Been-Pretty-Successful.html

https://www.loweringthebar.net/?p=46948

Upon reflection (and some email feedback) I have further thoughts about the reported aquatic escape of a robber who struck the Paddlefish restaurant at Walt Disney World last month. See “Was That Scuba Burglary a Successful Aquatic Escape?” (Oct. 24, 2025).

First, so far as I can tell there have been no further developments in the case since last week. I found no new references to it, and if anyone had been arrested, I’m pretty confident the Orange County Sheriff’s Office would have trumpeted that on its Facebook page. But all the recent posts there have to do with Halloween and the sheriff’s “Trunk’n’Treat” program, which seems to involve officers distributing candy from the trunks of their patrol cars. I’m fine with that, unless it’s a sting operation of some kind where they’re going to ask for people’s “papers” or check for outstanding warrants or something. I have no evidence of that at this time.

Second, those who wrote in to object to my classification of this escape as “not yet successful” … may have a point. He is gone, or at least his whereabouts are unknown, and it has been over six weeks now. I still like my eaten-by-alligator theory, but have to admit there is no evidence to support it. Some also pointed out that for there to be an “escape,” there really has to have been a pursuit, and that wasn’t the case here. He grabbed the cash and swam away before officers ever reached the scene. So this was more of a “getaway,” and again it does seem to have been successful at least for now. That too is a fair point.

I suppose the problem was really that this episode was just not in the same category as most of the others I’ve been talking about. The real point there is to encourage people who are actually being chased by law enforcement to stop plunging or jumping into some body of water, which is only going to slow you down and possibly put you and officers at risk. Even if you do have some kind of flotation device, they’re almost certain to have a better one, or they can just wait you out. One of my earliest mentions of this phenomenon, for example, involved someone (also in Florida) who tried to escape a foot pursuit by stealing a pedal boat. See “Sinking Pedal Boat Ends Ridiculous Escape Attempt” (Jan. 28, 2010). To catch him they only had to upgrade to a pontoon boat (with an engine, granted). So not only do you still end up in custody, you have the embarrassment factor of being apprehended by a pontoon boat.

But again, that was an “escape” attempt, not a carefully planned getaway, so it fits. The scuba-guy Disney robbery really doesn’t. Fair enough.

This assumes, of course, that there really was a getaway at all. Several experts, and by “experts” I mean random yahoos who posted something on a Disney-related message board I found, have suggested that maybe there wasn’t. As I suggested last time, there is already some reason to believe this was some sort of inside job, given the robber’s apparent knowledge of when and where the employees would be counting the day’s cash. And while a security camera showed the robber arriving, he blinded that camera with spray paint and so it didn’t seem him leave. We only have the other employees’ word for the getaway part of this, in other words, so maybe he just made a big entrance and then hid in the pantry or something until the coast was clear.

Again, this is utter speculation by me and the (other) random yahoos, and not to be taken as suggesting that there’s any evidence of such a conspiracy. Will I take credit for the idea later if it turns out to be true? Probably. But right now, utter speculation.

Did you vote in your most recent applicable election? (If you're not yet old enough, do you plan to vote in the future?)

Yes, I did. We had a by-election yesterday, in fact. I am very pleased to report that the Reform candidate was soundly defeated.
Have you ever protested or attended a march?

On a handful of occasions. The first was when I was still in high school, protesting Desert Storm. It is the only time I ever cut school and got detention.
What political issue is the most important to you?

Wow, that is a big question. I think probably human rights. Without the enforcement of a level of fundamental respect for others, we have terrifyingly little recourse from people who would happily trample over everyone else.
Are you a member of a party in your country? If so, which?

Yes to the first question. I’m not putting the answer to the second in a public post.
Do you ever plan to run for office?

I’ve been a paper candidate before, but I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. It’s very nearly mandatory to have to use social media to campaign as a candidate, and I’d rather not.

Tags:

Posted by Erika Moen

https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/happy-hallopeen/

https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/?p=13468

Light up your jack-off-O-laterns and summon some ghostly boo-bies because it’s time again for HALLOPEEN! No tricks, we’re bringing you nothin’ but treats in this round-up of all our spookiest comics from our vault. Join us (for free!) on Patreon to get our monthly newsletter of comics like this one! The Cummoning by Alina Most […]

https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/happy-hallopeen/

https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/?p=13468

For the

rarepairexchange I received a lovely Still Star-Crossed fic (that had good worldbuilding, good characterization, and excellent research backing it up):

you and you are heart in heart (2,289 words). Even now, two months after Paris’ defeat outside the walls of Verona, unrest still fermented. The peace treaty which had once hinged on Benvolio’s execution now hinged on Benvolio and Rosaline’s wedding.

And there was a lot of other good fic that you should check out. Here are some I liked:

Taking Chances Together (1254 words)
Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Spock/Nyota Uhura
Additional Tags: post s2e1 Amok Time, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary:

A musical collaboration turns into more...

In Splendid Sunshine Dressed (1868 words
Fandom: Casablanca (1942)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Rick Blaine, Victor Laszlo (Casablanca), Ilsa Lund
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Getting Together
Summary:

Rick is invited back into Ilsa's life... but what about her husband?

Here's to We (1233 words)
Fandom: MASH (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lorraine Anderson/Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan
Additional Tags: Slice of Life, Friends to Lovers, Character Study, Epistolary, Margaret Backstory Typical Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Episode Tag: s06e21 Temporary Duty, Episode Tag: s07e19 Hot Lips is Back In Town, 12x100
Summary:

Snapshots of Margaret and Lorraine's relationship from 1932-1952: growing up, growing apart, and finding their way back.

I Prayed For You (2445 words)
Fandom: MASH (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Father Francis Mulcahy
Additional Tags: Developing Relationship
Summary:

Francis gave something away in hopes of comfort. BJ held that comfort close, even in the late hours.

Or Father Mulchay's trip takes a bit longer than predicted, long enough for some reflection on something developing. (For the 2025 RarePair Exchange!)

How the Halcyon Song Lingers (1348 words)
Fandom: Little Women (2019 Movie - Gerwig)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Theodore "Laurie" Laurence/Amy March
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Parenthood, Married Life, Fall Vibes, Domestic Fluff
Summary:

A glimpse of family life with the Laurences, as Amy and Laurie go for an autumn stroll with little Bess.

Heart's Got Everything to Do With It (6700 words)
Fandom: Tin Man (US TV 2007)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Wyatt Cain/DG
Characters: DG (Tin Man), Wyatt Cain, Azkadellia (Tin Man), Jeb Cain
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, First Kiss, Queen DG
Summary:

It was like the Quest had never ended at all; DG had just run out of signposts to follow. Well, except maybe one....

Heart Murmur (2856 words)
Fandom: MASH (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Reunions, Cunnilingus, Hawkeye Pierce's canonical ED
Summary:

The woman who took the stage was a brunette, fading peroxide-blonde tips neatly tucked into a bun and graying at the temples. She looked better in a pantsuit than she ever had in fatigues, and she’d looked damn good in fatigues. Someone in the crowd wolf-whistled. She tapped her note cards to the podium with a glare that could jump start spontaneous combustion.

Margaret looked the same as ever, even brunette—like she was fully prepared to crush a man into dust for seeing her as less than she was.

The Broadwood Grand (4827 words)
Fandom: Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Colonel Brandon/Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility)
Additional Tags: Tags Contain Spoilers, Romance, Fluff, Marriage Proposal, Friendship/Love, Romantic Friendship, Love Confessions, Falling In Love, Piano, Family Fluff, POV Third Person Limited, Requited Love, Requited Unrequited Love, Present Tense, Regency Romance, Inspired by Jane Austen, Inspired by Music, Happy Ending, Extended Scene, Canon Compliant
Summary:

Marianne Dashwood’s heart is an ocean, deep and vast and rich with life. He has seen it shimmer with the sunlight of affection, roil with the storms of heartbreak, and reel into the calmness of acceptance; but the breeze will blow when it chooses to blow, and Brandon—ever ready with his sails—would wait forever for good winds.

One Kiss is All it Takes (1470 words)
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Luke Skywalker
Additional Tags: Getting Together, First Kiss, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Post-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker Needs A Hug
Summary:

After what happened on Bespin, Lando visits Luke in the infirmary.

Tags:

I am trying to remember a quotation that may or may not exist.

It is a bit like Kiss of the Spider Woman's "This dream is short, but this dream is happy."

Something like "this is a (something) story for bad times."

Any contenders?

{rf}

Happy Halloween! Having not slept for a variety of stupid reasons, I am appearing this year as the world's most tired Green Man.

Current Music: Lord Huron, "Watch Me Go"

Another tool, the The Country Living Grain Mill with power bar

$767.17

Tags:

So I dont lose it: CucinaPro Manual Pasta Maker

This will also roll oats, make veggies chips, phyllo dough and puff pastry.

Tags:

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: lolsobbing

We're thinking of trying out a quarter acre each of several cereal crops:

- duram wheat
- khorasan wheat
- hard spring red wheat
- dent corn
- rye
- barley
- millet
- oats
- buckwheat

So that's two plus acres that'll need to be cleared. More like four acres, since we'll be companion planting our veggies in with the cereals.

Tags:

Dept of, what will they think of next (some of this is, as I remarked elsewhere, resuscitating Ye Good Ol' Victorian Quackerie - though, as we concurred, VIBRATORS ARE NOT VICTORIAN!!!): With the menopause dildo, we've officially reached peak menopause bollocks.

(Declaration of interest: I once did a podcast with the author.)

***

Dept of, well, on the topic of dildos, or at least, urgent phallicism: I spent a year dating ~~conservative~~ [frothingly alt-right] men:

Something about getting ready to go on these dates made me feel like I was 18 again — except now I had the ability to run professional-level background checks, which I did. Not because I was operating on preconceived notions but because the few peers I told about my mission encouraged me to. Given some of the vitriol against women in online alt-right groups, they felt I should treat every date as if it were a threat to my life. I came up with a routine: before a date, I’d tell at least three people in advance where I was going and what time they should expect to hear from me by. I enlisted a friend who’s a former Navy SEAL to be my unofficial security consultant.

And they wonder why women are not dating....

And that's before getting to meet the actual doozies who are, apparently, not even the worst types on the dating apps.

***

Dept of, let's have some better news, good news about snails (the snails that one thought had been mown down in the ONward March of Progress, or at least, building much needed housing):

the snails are OK. Nothing bad is going to happen to the poor little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, the endangered creature which our Chancellor unfairly blamed for stopping a housing development, causing me to get grumpy on social media. But in following up to try and see what actually happened, I found out a bunch of interesting – and in my view extremely heartening – stuff.
.... it was always a false dichotomy, it was always possible to have the houses and the snails too.

***

Dept of gilded snails in a very different space: From snails to street signs: Soho’s history revealed on a new digital map - the snails on the facade of L'Escargot Restaurant.

***

Dept of, gosh I have met (many years ago) the curator of this exhibition: New York City celebrates the “Gay Harlem Renaissance”

Tags:

We were supposed to be open tonight for Halloween, free hayrides after dark, carved pumpkin walk, campfire, etc...

40 mph winds. we don't actually have a real building, our selling area is a glorified pole barn. So I rescheduled it and said we'd do it all tomorrow. I have an employee coming this afternoon for farm work (just texted him to change it to sunday woot) but my main goal for this afternoon is more pumpkin carving. I've got three pumpkins bins worth already done, probably need to do another bin or so worth. jigsaws work fantastic, plus a hole saw mounted on a drill for punching out the back for gletch cleanout.

I spent this morning taking down one small canopy and strapping the corners of the other two to tractors. My dad is out of town having fun this weekend, so I'm doing it solo. Not too bad to be honest, we did a pretty good strapping a few weekends ago when we had 30 mph winds, so it was mostly getting the tractors in place and putting straps around the axles in place of the wood totes and pumpkin bins we used last time. I doubled up all the small straps since my dad took the truck and all of the nice big 2 inch straps with him by accident. My mom is going to the hardware store anyway, so she's going to pick up some extras to keep here on the farm for this sort of situation.

So now I've got the afternoon to carve, then relax tonight, so some spinning or maybe go over to my shed and finish the warp on the loom. Fantastic. I've got plans to take monday and tuesday off work, we had two groups reschedule to thursday and friday next week and then we are done for reals. But I want to bake things and make some food which works best when I have two days off in a row. I did successfully get my weavers guild show and sale inventory done, I have 25 items for the sale! Leftover key fobs from last year, a shawl and eleven skeins of yarn. I upped my price a little bit this year on the yarns but they are mostly pretty merinos or merino blends and I think they'll sell even with a slightly higher price. Still surprised I got that many done this year given everything. Someday soon I will have my CPW out of storage and it will be glorious.

My parents have floated a plan: get the office at the new house completely finished, get their desks and computers and then move their bedroom over there, so the work will be staring them in the face all the time and they'll be more motivated. They'd still need to cook here at the farm house, but if they manage that, I will be able to get a huge chunk of the shed over here in one go since their office will be my crafting room. that would be amazing, I could get the boxes in my room moved down and unpacked too. Maybe even wash a fleece??? wild. I can almost taste the off season

Tags:

farming,
personal

Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

A Sea Otter and His New Toy

BABBDI: for all your liminal brutalist platforming needs

visualization

Halloween

"However much candy you want, the answer is yes."

Recent reading

Heart Mountain

Hallowe'en

Okay, It Seems to Have Been Pretty Successful

Related Stories

The Friday Five on Halloween 🎃

Happy Hallopeen!

Rare Pair Recs

(no subject)

I made a deal with the devil, but I never got paid

grain mill

manual pasta maker

Satirists Cannot Work Under These Conditions

growing cereal crops

Assortment

Having a lazy day

About Me

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