#return to this

[candicoated]

We really need to bring back traditional family values. This is what they stole from us.

[cosmogyros]

Normally I don't plan my reading in advance, because I simply follow whenever my fancy leads me, but this challenge seems fun! 25 books I want to read in 2025 - let's go.

(I've been missing the classics recently, so this list is a bit classic-heavy. Also I ended up being unable to keep it to 25. Oops.)

Color coding:

pink = fiction

green = nonfiction

An asterisk means it's a book I already own in physical form.

As I read books on this list, I will italicize them.

1. Willa Cather - My Ántonia

2. Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

4. Han Kang - Human Acts

5. Geraldine Brooks - Horse

6. Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

7. Ruth Kinna - The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

8. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

9. Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

10. Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues

11. Mary Doria Russell - The Sparrow

12. Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen

13. Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States

14. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground

15. Upton Sinclair - The Jungle

16. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths*

17. Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

18. Akwaeke Emezi - Little Rot

19. Naomi Klein - No Logo

20. Hengameh Yaghoobifarah - Ministerium der Träume

21. Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing*

22. Susanna Clarke - Piranesi

23. E. M. Forster - Maurice

24. Richard Adams - Watership Down

25. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

26. Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady

27. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

28. Frank Herbert - Dune

Additionally, I'm going to tag on a second goal list. My "currently reading" pile has become way too huge, because I have a fickle heart and tend to hop around from book to book (or, as Bertie Wooster would say, I "flit and sip" like a butterfly). So I'm aiming to finish at least five books that I already started in 2024:

1. Albert Einstein - Essays in Humanism

2. Daniela Dröscher - Lügen über meine Mutter

3. Priscilla Murolo & A. B. Chitty - From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

4. Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks*

5. Simon Blackburn - Think: A Compelling Intro to Philosophy*

[chiseld]

Further “calculations”

Back at it again! I finally returned to the calculator project last week and – in a sudden burst of productivity – did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I converted the whole thing over to OOP principles. It’s still a mess, but the app is technically an object now, which I’m happy about. And it still works!

This is actually the first time I converted random strewn-about code into OOP, so I’m kind of ridiculously proud of myself :D

I then returned to it again today and fixed the biggest remaining bug by implementing a new method. Happy days!

What it desperately needs at this point is some SERIOUS refactoring. But I’m a little nervous about that tbh. I don’t want to accidentally break it and have to revert my Git commits, even though I know that’s a normal part of programming and I should really know how to do it.

Guess I know what my next big personal challenge is going to be: break a Git project so badly that it requires reverting! Argh, even just writing that sentence scares me a bit :0 But that’s a good sign I guess.

[cosmogyros]

I'm finally reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and boy is it good. If I weren't already mostly vegan, I'm pretty sure I would be after reading this. Oof.

[cosmogyros]

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.

- Brianna Wiest (x)

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 3/30

My study spot today:

I am progressing veeeeery slowly through this challenge, haha. I don’t think I’ve managed two days in a row since I started :X But “slow but steady wins the race”, and I’ve learned by now that sticktoitiveness is more important than glamorous study habits.

The other day, as I approached the end of Step 1 of the tutorial, I ran into a challenge. Lynn suggests going and finding your own data and using the new function you’ve just created to process it as well. So I found some data on real estate transactions in Sacramento (thrills and chills, I know – but the point is to graph it and so on, it doesn’t need to be super interesting), and gave it a shot.

But the command line didn’t like my new file, and spat out this error message at me: “_csv.Error: new-line character seen in unquoted field”

I’ll be the first to admit that I do get intimidated by reading the docs, and I realized the problem here was clearly my lack of understanding of the Python csv module I was working with. There’s no point in just copying out every line of the tutorial by hand if you don’t really understand what you’re doing.

So, I copied the error message and pasted it into Google, found a StackOverflow conversation about that exact error, and one person suggested “opening the file using universal newline mode”. I had no idea what this meant, so I took a deep breath and dove into the docs. After spending a few minutes reading them, I felt much more motivated – it’s not as scary as it looks! I found a description of the exact parameters that the csv.reader() method takes, messed around with a little trial and error – and it worked! I was absolutely thrilled to see my huge ugly flood of real-estate data appear in the command line :D

I still want to try the “extra credit” challenges she mentions at the very end of the page, although they’d be a big step up:

“You can continue to play around; try >>> help(parse.parse) to see our docstring, see what happens if you feed the parse function a different file, delimiter, or just a different variable. Challenge yourself to see if you can create a new file to save the parsed data, rather than just a variable.”

[alexihollis]

*puts on my pink theorizing hat*

Something tells me other!Jackie isn’t the only Yellowjacket capable of reaching across the rivers of timelines—there’s a whole alternate team of girls from different realities capable of reaching out to their counterparts that Other!Jackie knows about. Each alternate self is sending memories of their timelines, including memories we (as viewers) are unfamiliar with. Shauna’s dream where the team eats her baby is one example of another reality. Other!Jackie is probably the closest in terms of morality and personality to the Yellowjackets in this fic’s timeline. As for the alternate Yellowjackets….

Something tells me the Other!Yellowjackets don’t share the same morals and motives as Other!Jackie. The way Other!Jackie is easily capable of manipulating another timeline (and has the capacity to possess others, and whatever other unseen Wilderness psychic magic abilities) tells me she has been doing this for a LONG time. And if she has those abilities then it stands to reason that the Other!Yellowjackets do too.

Where are the Other!Yellowjackets? Do the Other!Yellowjackets know that Jackie has successfully made contact with a “better” timeline? Or is Jackie protecting the girls in this timeline from the Other!Yellowjackets taking over and psychically cannibalizing and possessing their alternate universe selves as a means of survival??? Is Other!Tai ACTUALLY another alternate Tai who has successfully pierced the veil between timelines and consciousnesses with her own motives? Is she in cahoots with Other!Jackie???

Your fic is absolutely insanely good the way it keeps me theorizing and guessing. The way you’ve incorporated the alt timelines seamlessly while having the very one be completely in character even with slightly different origins WOW this food is a delicious Michelin Star meal nom nom nom nom nom

^this.

This is literally the only form of payment I need for the fic I write. Holy shit, you spent so much time thinking about something i wrote, i'm going to cry!!!!

And i want to say soo much but i shall wait. I shall Return One Day to this post after Later Chapters so there can be more Discussion about this. but im so glad you are enjoying it im dying

(For those unfamiliar with the fic if anyone else reads this post and is interested lol, its Yellowjackets Shaunahat: Strings)