First swim of the summer

This weekend was absolutely baking in Cambridge, at least by UK standards, and I finally had enough time to head over to the fantastic outdoor pool to swim some laps. This pool is always a bit of a challenge — I tend to only swim when I'm in Australia (which generally happens every two or three years), and this pool is 90 metres long. It's also unheated, which means the first lap makes my lungs seize up. While I can quite comfortably swim fifty metres without difficulty, even after a year-long pause from swimming, 90 metres has me panting like a lifelong smoker by the end of the length. Nevertheless, I managed 900 metres on Saturday, and 990 today, arriving at opening time in order to beat the crowds. It got easier by the end, so I really need to try to maintain a regular routine of swimming throughout the summer to keep my lung capacity up.

Other than swimming, I've spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on my Night on Fic Mountain assignment, which took me very much outside my comfort zone. I'm happy with the overall result, so let's hope my recipient is too.

I've been making my way through the selected works of those nominated for Best Editor Hugo Awards, but it's starting to feel like a chore, especially for those editors whose tastes really do not align with my own, and I think I've made up my mind as to how to vote in these categories anyway. I'll stick up another discussion post in the next couple of days for the editor and zine categories, and it would be great to see what others of you voting in the Hugos feel about the nominees.

One of my dearest friends, the fabulous lowercasename has created a new social network, which from an initial poke around seems to combine the best bits of Dreamwidth (communities and personal blogs, filtered levels of access) with the best bits of Tumblr (a feature fairly similar to the reblog one, but only available on posts public to all users, not friends-locked ones), plus no ads and no selling of users' data. I'm quite happy with the community and platform here at Dreamwidth, but over the years I've lost touch with many people who first welcomed me online, as they moved away from our original forums and onto platforms where I wasn't interested in following, and this new site looks like it might be a good way to hang out with them. I'm not sure about the scalability of the site, but lowercasename has been upfront about the fact that if it becomes too expensive to maintain without income from ads or selling data, he will shut the site down before doing either of those things.

If you're interested in joining, the platform is called Sweet, and I'm dolorosa over there. If you join, do let me know, and feel free to add me.