choco_frosh | Reading

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/16/hello-but-keep-it-moving-human

New research alert! Sea otters, it turns out, aren’t fans of farm-fresh oysters in this study - no matter how fresh they are. In fact, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks found zero evidence of otters dining on oysters, even when these bivalves were grown in farms right in their foraging zones.

So what’s the takeaway? Otters are simply being their smart, energy-efficient selves. Diving dozens of feet to access caged oysters takes too much effort compared to other options - though they did go for the more accessible mussel ropes at one mixed farm.

🦪 As Elakha is conducting our own research study with oyster farmers here in Oregon, these findings help us clarify how otter activity can coexist with coastal economies and ecosystems.

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/16/hello-but-keep-it-moving-human

choco_frosh

Too much coffee.

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/15/here-im-open

Via Vancouver Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/15/here-im-open

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/14/up-otterscope

Via Mark Gillow

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/14/up-otterscope

sovay

I had not thought there were any meteor showers of consequence this month, but it seems that the swift pale streak between the telephone wires southwest of Cassiopeia belonged to the September Epsilon Perseids, so named despite their radiant in β Persei, the demon-star of Algol. I can hope it was not wildfire drift that accounted for the candle-tint of the half-moon, which was doing its autumnal trick of hanging like a lantern in the not yet leafless trees. The last of this summer's monarchs flew just before sunset, the twenty-second of her name.

Current Music: Suzanne Vega, "Left of Center"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/13/some-days-you-just-need-some-alone-time

Via MTSOfan

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/13/some-days-you-just-need-some-alone-time

sovay

I am glad to read that a classicist on Tumblr whom I do not know feels validated by a poem I wrote a dozen years ago, because she's right in turn about the linkage of ideas that led to its writing: the evocatio of Juno from Veii in 396 BCE, the evocatio of Tanit from Carthage in 146 BCE, the assimilation of Tanit to Juno Caelestis rather than Ištar-starred Venus, the self-fulfilling loop of enmity that a double-thefted goddess makes of the Aeneid and under it all the irony that Vergil even in his Renaissance aspect as magician could not foresee, that Carthage-haunted Rome was itself built on the needfire of the most famously sacked city of the ancient world, Troy whose gods Aeneas salvaged from the night of its destruction and now we remember Rome as the epitome of decadence, the eternally, contagiously falling city.

Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.

Current Music: Frank Turner, "The Next Storm"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/12/fast-asleep-under-a-blanket-of-leaves-clutching-a-rock

Via uso_otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/12/fast-asleep-under-a-blanket-of-leaves-clutching-a-rock

sovay

Not having read any of the source novels, approximately twenty minutes into the first series of Poldark (1975–77) as I lay on the couch self-medicating with the late eighteenth century, I remarked to

spatch, "Is there any aspect of this homecoming that is not going to be a clusterfuck?" on which the answer turned out to be no, whence it seems the engine of the plot. Since I came to this show by having to wait for the third season of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) to arrive at my local branch library, I was more than ordinarily entertained by the line pertaining to the hero's soldiering past, "Shocking business, eh? Losing the Colonies." The bomber leather frock coat is as impressive as advertised.

Current Music: Slow Pulp, "New Horse"

sovay

This afternoon my godchild's school was locked down because one of the students had a gun and the nineteenth and twentieth monarchs of the summer hatched. What am I supposed to say about the day itself? That I am reminded even without the martial canonization of a never-laid grief that nothing is easier to shovel under six feet of lime than memory? The last cousin of my grandparents' generation died earlier this week at nearly a century. The lines to the past snap fast enough, no one needs to hurry them along.

On that note, Andrew Kozma's "The Black Death" (2025). I like that Ulysses S. Grant is top of the list of historical characters Jared Harris wants to play, in part because of his civil rights commitments as president and as a counterweight to his negative figuration in the mythos of the Lost Cause. I need a door in the hall closet to BFI Southbank if they are going to keep doing inaccessibly tantalizing series like last year's complete Powell and Pressburger or, currently, Anna May Wong.

Current Music: Modern English, "I Melt with You"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/11/just-going-with-the-flow

Photo by Will Wade via Elakha Alliance

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/11/just-going-with-the-flow

sorcyress

I spent most of the summer not doing my usual morning ritual*, just...travel, and Pinewoods, and surgery, and everything else. With the start of the school year I've gotten back into it, and wow, I have missed reading y'all's journals so much, I'm sorry to have deprioritized it because dreamwidth really is the only social media that I spend an hour on and feel refreshed and connected afterwards.

I'm glad y'all are still out here writing (and if you're someone I follow who hasn't posted in a while, I'd love to see posts from you too!)

~Sor
MOOP!

*Morning Ritual, which has gone through many iterations since 1995, but is mostly fundamentally the same: Wake up, get a bowl of cereal, open the comics, read comics until you've read all of them or it's time to go to school.

Comics were newspaper from first grade until I went to college (one of my favourite things about The Comics Curmudgeon is that he and I cut our teeth on the same Baltimore Sun comics page), by which point the webcomics slowly shifted until they were a morning game. I've got about two dozen tabs I open each morning these days, all comics except for the last two, which are a personal forum for the pie shop folks to blog about their lives, and here. The good kinds of social media!

landofnowhere

Short post because (a) it's actually only been a week (b) busy and (c) while I did spend a bunch of time on planes it was mostly not reading. (I did watch the movie of Die Vermessung der Welt with English subtitles, and while it worked to keep me entertained while very sleep-deprived, on reflection I'm too invested in the actual historical Carl Friedrich Gauss to accept any ahistorical substitutes.)

To Shape a Dragon's Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose. I thought it would be appropriate to read about dragons on the plane trip, and then I didn't read very much, but that's fine as the dragons don't really get to fly in this book anyway. This book was not very subtle in a way that I suspect I'd have preferred if I was younger, which makes sense as it's YA. There are presumably people who would review this book as "I thought I was getting a story about dragons, not a story about how racism and colonialism are bad", but I had read enough reviews to know what I was getting, which was that, but also a school story with interesting alternate-history chemistry and telepathic pet dragons who are not yet a big part of the story, and I enjoyed it! I will definitely be reading book 2 (which I appreciate about summer vacation rather than skipping to the second year of school) when it comes out in January.

sorcyress

Tonight's adventure was going to a Jazz Emu concert with a bunch of my polycule!

The concert was at the Sonia, where I hadn't thought I'd ever been, but I looked up at one point to see the old sign for TT The Bear's Place and had my heart sing. The stage is a lot higher than it used to be, which was good for a concert where we were mostly sitting in chairs looking up to the stage.

He sang a bunch of new songs, interleaved with comedy Bits and other general nonsense. It was a lot of fun to go see a show for a guy who I kinda know of, but don't obsessively follow. Sometimes it's good to have a hundred people for whom you're the ninth favourite thing. I was delighted when he closed out with three of his already known and published songs --it was both fun to hear a live version of something at least two partners have separately made me watch, and REALLY fun to jam out to songs that I didn't know but the people around me were incredibly into. People watching is so good!

After, Tess-Todd-Phoebe-Austin went off to get ice cream, and me and Tuesday loitered for a bit. I purchased a cassette tape, mostly for the utter delight of purchasing a cassette at a kinda divey venue in the year that starts with a 20. This is 1980s shit, and I'm thrilled to be part of it!

We were rewarded by the man himself poking his nose out for the half dozen die-hards who had loitered. He was very clearly exhausted --and his accent is much easier to pin down when he's not Performing, so when he said "I'm exhausted from jet lag" I could make a much better guess about what that meant. But it was pleasing to get in the quick "you did awesome, it was a lot of fun!", and also nice to get that little peek behind the scenes.

It was a really delightful night, and a good reminder that actually there are some pretty awesome little concert spots tucked around my city, and I should find more of them and go to more shows just for the fuck of it. I mean, who has time and all, but live performances are a lot of fun, and I like having them in my life.

~Sor

MOOP!

PostScript: Okay, holy shit, was glancing at the wikipedia page and found out that before he was in full Jazz Emu mode, he wrote one of the best twitter threads of all time? It's rare to have such a Neil Cicierega moment that's not actually by NeilCic!

(the thread is the top song from every decade dating back to the 14000s BC. Grab your headphones, it's very stupid and funny)

[A Neil Cicierega moment is that moment when you are laughing at something funny on the internet, or reminiscing about something old, or being amused by a weird cool thing, and then you realize that it is yet another project by That One Guy]

sovay

It is my fifteenth anniversary with

rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the first plague year.

Current Music: David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra, "Everybody Laughs"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/10/sea-otter-sneaks-a-cheeky-snack

Via Sea Life Birmingham

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/10/sea-otter-sneaks-a-cheeky-snack

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/9/please-place-snacks-here-human

Via Vancouver Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/9/please-place-snacks-here-human

sovay

I wish merely to register my pleasure that when I went looking for the uncredited actor playing the dean of the law school in the early scenes of Winterset (1936), I found that Murray Kinnell had the kind of Wikipedia biographer who includes short reviews with their subject's stage and screen resume. "An unusual role for Kinnell as a derelict one-time gentleman; the film opened in July 1931." "'No man is a hero to his valet', as Kinnell's character in this murder mystery could testify." "Kinnell as yet another butler, though this time with an unexpected flourish." I am much more used to finding this kind of partisanship on social media: with no prior attachment to an actor whom I did not notice previously in a handful of pre-Codes, just its enthusiasm makes me want to see these lovingly noted small parts even when a non-zero quantity of Charlie Chan seems to be involved. I hope Kinnell would have appreciated his future, however microscopic fandom.

Current Music: Neko Case, "Wreck"

sovay

Unless I lost track of one in the phone tree, I have just spent my afternoon calling five different doctor's offices, garnished with one bookstore and one library, and I would still like a refund on selected and considerable tracts of physical existence. In other news, while I have always had an inevitable affection for the mild-mannered character acting of Donald Meek, I have not seen him anywhere near recently enough to explain his appearance in last night's dreams, especially not the one with the used book store crumbling literally on the edge of some awful revelation. Over the last three days, I mainlined a rewatch of the first two seasons of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) and just before bed had started re-reading Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), which in the years since I originally read and much later wrote about it has garnered at least one nonfiction rebuttal and more contextually interested explorations, because nothing engages the human instinct for rabbit holes like a cold murder case. No offense to Donald Meek, I'm not sure where he came in.

P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.