• In meetings at work, for my actions or actions that I need to follow up on etc. If I am prepared, I will add them to an existing document that we are working from in the meeting or will create a specific actions email as we go. If I am not prepared, it will be notes jotted in a physical notebook. In either case, I will then copy any actions for me to MS TO Do - which is one of the very few relevant apps that we have available on both the locked down phones and laptops. Just occasionally, it is more appropriate to make notes directly in the TO Do app.

• Generally for non-work stuff, I will use Google tasks - since it available on all platforms and integrates with the calendar etc. I would love to find a good alternative to google and have tried a few over the years, but have never found anything that I can get to at work and on all platforms at home and will integrate with a calendar that is also available on all platforms - including those that my SO uses - as well as this.

The majority of notes that I make these days are either things that I have to do or are updates on the status of particular projects or systems though.

• Historical Fiction: I, Claudius from 1976. It stands up staggeringly well.
• Fantasy: Extraordinary (2023), Neverwhere (1996 - Gaiman's first TV series)
• Crime: The Night Manager (2016), Slow Horses (2022), Mare of Easttown (2021)

Also Beforeigners (2019, Norway), which kinda qualifies for all of these categories.

Bbc Radio 4 have any number of dramas in their back catalogue. One that I particularly enjoyed is Alan Plater's Only a Matter of Time - available on the Internet archive, I find.

Then Orson Welles original War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 is well worth a listen. That is available in several places around the Web.

Then, of course, there is Big Finish, who started off doing Doctor Who audios and have produced hundreds over the years - far more hours than there are of T V Doctor Who, classic and new - but they also produce a lot of other dramas, based on other properties and some completely original.

Overall their earlier ones are where the standout tales are, but they are fairly reliably entertaining throughout.

I've got the same one here as on reddit, and on tildes as it happens. It is a variant on a local mythic being in my part of the world.

Archive.is link..

Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.

As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.

I didn't get a lot further than the garden this weekend but, having moved to a rural spot (East Anglia, UK) only a couple of months back, we are still finding new things in and around the garden.

One of the most notable is that a Kestrel has recently fledged in the woodland at the end of the garden - so it and parent are quite prominent and vocal on the several suitable perches around and about. We have set up the bins on a tripod in the front window and are getting some great views.

We also have a red kite passing overhead quite frequently.

Otherwise, brown hare loping through the garden, plenty of grey squirrel and occasional muntjac, green and occasional great spotted woodpeckers. Most smaller birds are steering clear at the moment due to the predators though. Then a southern hawker made a few passes on Sunday, and a several meadow browns and a red admiral were flitting about. We have burdock growing along the edges in a few places and just noticed a cluster of lords and ladies at the bottom.

We also noticed a branch had fallen from one of the adjoining ash trees and was hung up on the power line. A call to UKPN brought them out to deal with it surprisingly quickly. Looking at the canopy, I fear that it is succumbing to ash dieback. I expect that we will have more falling branches and that it will need to be felled this winter or next.

The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.

Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn't scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it's own right rather than poor imitations.

For this kind of thing I (eventually) use a basic Pomodoro method: Set a timer for 20 mins and make a start on one of the jobs. You can do pretty much anything for just 20mins - and with some of these kind of things that have been hanging around for a while it could just be a question of working out exactly what you do need to do and getting stuff ready to do it next time etc.

Either way, work at it for 20mins. Then your timer will go off and you can stop and reward yourself - if you want to. Chances are, that by the 20mins mark you may well be stuck in and might just want to push on and get it done - then get your reward.

Strict Pomodoro is to work for 20mins then break for 5 and repeat, but that depends on the situation.

A regular weekly schedule would look something like:

• Practical volunteering with a local wildlife organisation.
• Studying something, maybe with the OU.
• Working on the house and garden
• Reading
• A decent length hike
• Working on a particular project: woodworking, writing, painting, coding, maybe putting whatever I have learnt recently into practice.
• Visiting somewhere.

JWs certainly. There was a phase of Mormons that I was subject to a while back. I don't know if they regularly do this in the UK though.

They can sleep for longer. There is the incident of a Egyptian snail that was collected for the British Museum in 1846 - seemingly dead - and which then woke up in 1850.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

It is pretty clear that this is a joke sign/poster - akin to "you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps" and so on.

Definitely worthwhile!

feels a lot like Columbo.

It is very conciously like Columbo - even down to the font of the titles I think. I see it as 3 parts Columbo, 1 part The Fugitive and 1 part Knives Out. There are a couple of wonky episodes but I enjoyed it a lot overall - especially the penultimate one.

Another BF listener here - I really liked Walker and McGann on screen in Annika too.

Otherwise, my SO and I have the Ted Lasso finale lined up. The third season (yes, I know, but I agree with the Americans that there is a distinction between series and season) has been a necessary conclusion to the material in the previous two, but not without some fun moments.

And - in terms of other UK TV - we are just on to season two of Jam and Jerusalem which I totally missed at the time but am enjoying now.

Otherwise, in non-UK shows, Drops of God and Shrinking are the clear highlights in our lineup at the moment.

A week.

I was in my teens and had no commitments at the time and just spontaneously decided not to eat or sleep for a few days - which I later decided would be a week. At the time, I had no idea of the world record for this or I probably would have tried for that - although, obviously, I was not supervised or anything.

The afternoons from the second day onwards were the worst - when I felt pretty lousy - but otherwise I was running on serotonin and was pretty much on a natural high for most the duration.

At the end, I cycled 12 miles during which one of my feet cramped and left me jabbing at the pedal as it went past, but I did it ok.

I slept extremely well when I finally did, but I took some while to get back into the whole eating thing again.

There is no way in hell that I could do anything like that now.

Ahh - ok. I had not met that bug before. I certainly did intend to post there.

Thanks!

Some that I have enjoyed:

• A Spy Among Friends
• Slow Horses
• The Ipcress File (both the recent TV show and the 1965 film are great)
• Traitors (2019)
• The Night Manager
• London Spy
• The Game (2014)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (both the TV show from 1979 and the 2011 film are great)
• Smiley's People

A) I have never touched tumblr.

B) I first heard it around 30 years back, so a little before tumblr.

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

You can't get a lot cooler than that.

A deckchair? A pub sign?

My 'big read' this year is Finnegans Wake which I am reading weekly along with the reddit TrueLit sub. It would be a very different experience without the comments and interpretation from there, so that's something that I will be thinking about...

Otherwise, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher, which is engaging and well paced, a Doctor Who novel from the '90s and am listening to Ron Hutton's Queens of the Wild. This books are always authoritative and entertaining but I have only just started this one so can't say a lot so far.

If I have to pick one, then the 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers.

I know that the Coen brothers did a remake, and I am a fan of most of theirs, but I have no interest in this remake. The original could not be topped, IMHO.

I have a Plex server for film, tv, audiobooks and music and and a Calibre server for ebooks. I have shelves for my physical book collection that now need re-organising, since I have recently moved. Getting the Plex and Calibre server up and running was a lot quicker, I have to say.

At some stage, I expect that I will move to Jellyfin, but Plex is still ok for now.

I have three "!subscribe pending"s in my list after a session of joining a few days back. For me, they are showing up in my sidebar and I can post to them as usual, it seems. It is just that they don't change from 'pending'.

We've recently moved. The house is basically in order - give or take a couple of stacks of boxes in the corner - and the shed is kinda there too, so this weekend is 'doing things in the garden' with hedge trimming the first on the list, along with scanning Gumtree for a suitable mower. I am not going to be borrowing our new neighbour's one for a third time however friendly and happy about it he is.

Presumably this was not a single snow crystal, but an agglomeration. More details on large snowflakes here.

Yes, AMC. Releasing weekly and ep 7 this week.

I have - for quite some time now - been working my way through the Virgin New Adventures series of Doctor Who novels. There are over 60 of them, and although I started at a reasonable pace, my available reading time diminished a lot due to changing circumstances - and I am also reading other non-SF things as well. As a result, I am not getting through them very quickly now.

This was the most recent phase of my "read/watch/listen to ALL the fiction in the expanded Whoniverse starting with the first Doctor" project. At this point, that project has reduced to "...and ending with the seventh: the end of Claasic Who".

Anyway, the VNAs - published in the 'wilderness years' of the '90s - were basically the first occasion on which DW media could be free from any TV expectations, and were able to do their own thing much more. Some of these worked really well whilst others just didn't. Death and Diplomacy, which is my current one, is one of the better ones, with some great character beats for the Doctor, but not outstanding.

I am heading towards the end of this series and will reconsider before embarking on to the Eighth Doctor Adventures. I have heard good things, but I have already listened to all of Big Finish's Eighth Doctor material - and thoroughly enjoyed it - and I might just leave it there and get back to other SF altogether.

There is https://beehaw.org/c/creative which seems to be fairly active and certainly includes some knitters.

It's not quite there yet where I am, but I am certainly hoping to a bit later this summer from time to time. I have hopes of WFH (...From Hammock) at some stage, now that I have garden that is suitable.

Yes - -for certain values of SF. Nobody is going to call the MCU hard SF, and superheroes are a fairly clear genre of their own, but in the broadest sense that genre certainly feels like it fits into the overall category of SF.

I have an unexpected WFH day today due to a face-to-face meeting being cancelled. Most of the day will probably be filled with emails and on-line meeting about the reason that the meeting was cancelled though.

Tonight we are evidently having falafel and then I will be putting the new hedge-trimmer to work over the weekend.

How is your weekend looking?

!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz looks interesting.

!ukcasual@lemmy.world might become a pleasant UK based one

Ha - no I had not even noticed, at least consciously. The mind moves in mysterious ways.

I would advise not reading them all together. They were published separately and are best read that way IMHO - just dipped into between other reads. James had particular settings and themes that his did extremely well and returned to often. I love love his tales, but I must admit that reading them them all consecutively does them no favours.

Overrated: Before Sunrise (1995) - tedious and self-indulgent. I would rather have seen the play about the cow.

Underrated: After Hours (1985) - One of Scorsese's absolute best. Nightmarish, out-of-control, pitch-black comedy.

I'm very much a fan of Dunsany - though I'm in my '50s so certainly don't count as a younger reader. I clearly recall reading The Hoard of the Gibbelins as a teen (probably in de Camp's The Spell of Seven) and being smitten from then on.

Moving further afield than fantasy, I don't know if anyone reads M. R. James these days. His ghost stories are still adapted for seasonal TV shorts by the BBC as well as cropping up on Radio 4, but whether he is actually read...?

Another that is underappreciated is George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, which to my mind is easily on a par with Three Men in a Boat, but gets nothing like as much appreciation. But, then how many people read Three Men... nowadays?