Reading

(no subject)

It was our first craft fair of the year yesterday, so the days before involved checking through stock while James finished off new items. With him having to cancel a few fairs last year after breaking his elbow, there was lots to sell. It was held at our local cat only vet in aid of Consett Cats, and went very well. It's a small space so things got crowded, but we managed. And a bonus, I didn't adopt any of the adorable kittens there for cat cuddles. I was exhausted last night, though, ready for bed at eight, but managed to hold on to nine.

On the subject of broken elbows, James was finally discharged from physio. They said they've pretty much done all they can for him and his grip and strength is much better. He still can't get his hand to his mouth, but at this point the only thing that may help that is surgery and neither of us are keen on that happening as it would be very little gain for a big risk. Not that he's had an appointment to discuss the CT scan results yet, so surgery may not even be an option whether he wants it or not.

We went swimming again last week, got to the pool and the receptionist said, are you aware the pool shuts at 9:30 for an aqua aerobics class? And no, no I was not aware. But we got a good 40 minutes swimming so better than nothing.

B12 injection day again on Thursday and I went from the doctors to the gym. Can't say I felt any more energetic, though did do a 45 minute recumbent cycle session so maybe there was a bit of a boost going on. It was actually great at the gym as it was nearly empty for most of the time I was there. Which was good as they'd completely ran out of hygiene wipes so no one could wipe down the machines after use. Which was pretty gross and I cleaned mine the best I could with the hem on my t-shirt.

We went to see Freakier Friday and it was fun, a good way to spend a couple of hours.

Weight management class was about unhelpful thinking patterns, and it was one of the best classes I've been to yet ( cut for those not interested )

Entry tags:

Under the greengage sun

This has been a pretty standard weekend: exercise, Saturday lunchtime in the market, a little bit of wandering with Matthias, Saturday film night, some reading, some cooking, some pottering about in the garden. I feel stretched but relaxed, which is exactly what I wanted.

Due to all the travel (and being sick), my exercise regime has been very irregular for the past couple of months, and for various reasons, yesterday was my first time doing my two hours of Saturday fitness classes for about six weeks. It was tough going, but I made it through, though my muscles are very angry at me today. After struggling my way through the classes, I met Matthias at the market, and we did the week's grocery shopping (mainly vegetables, of which there are many, and all are splendid), collected library books, and ate woodfired pizza from a food truck in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, which was filled with excitable dogs. I also impulse-bought a secondhand Le Creuset lidded skillet in extremely good condition, for half price, which was an unexpected bonus.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon lying around on the couch, alternating between reading and watching cooking videos on Youtube, apart from half an hour doing stretchy yoga in an attempt to stave off the inevitable muscle soreness. Then I cooked a lazy dinner (vegetable frittata — other than chopping the vegetables for roasting, you just stick things in the oven and leave them alone), and we settled in for our selected Saturday night film: Mountainhead, a direct-to-TV satire about a quartet of terrible American tech billionaires holing up in a mountain retreat to get away from the fallout from a disastrous rollout of new features on one billionaire's social media platform, and plot and scheme about the future. This is possibly too on the nose for US politics reasons (two characters are really obvious fictionalised versions of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; the others feel more like amalgams of various horrible tech elites), and it's not exactly subtle, but if you want to spend an hour and a half watching the antics of a quartet of terrible, oblivious, and pathetic people, this will serve you very well. The dialogue is absolutely word perfect.

Sunday dawned sunny and bright, and I headed off to the pool to swim my laps through liquid sunshine (again difficult, as my swimming routine has been as erratic as my fitness class attendance), and then walk home, where I passed a house in which three different cats were all lying contentedly in various patches of sunlight, looking thoroughly pleased with their life choices. The morning was mostly eaten up with cooking crepes and doing household chores, but Matthias and I did venture out briefly after lunch to get gelato (a good life choice on our part). I've been spending the afternoon doing yoga and catching up on Dreamwidth, and in a bit I'll get started on dinner, which will be a stuffed capsicum recipe from the Ottolenghi/Tamimi Jerusalem cookbook, using some of the giant tomatoes from our garden.

This week's reading has had a bit more genre variety than normal, which made me happy.

( Books behind the cut )

And that's pretty much it, although earlier in the week, Matthias and I also met up with friends from our former department, who now live in Germany and have a ten-month-old baby. It was a hot night, and we sat out under the trees in a lovely Cambridge beer garden, catching up and delighting in the antics of their very cute baby. I hadn't seen them since their wedding, which now feels like an age ago.

I'll close out this post with the news that one of my friends from undergrad, who is now a children's book author, won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year. (Hers isn't the book that gets discussed in depth in the article, but I was struggling to find any publication other than paywalled material that focused on hers.) On top of winning the juried vote, her book also won the shadow award voted on by a panel of children, which is fantastic, and very well deserved.

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The Day in Spikedluv (Saturday, Aug 16)

I hit the Bakery and Agway while I was downtown and got in a walk around the park. I stopped at the bank on the way home and at the library on the way to mom’s. (I also stopped at the garage on the way home because someone brought in eggs. Even though the price has dropped substantially (and I just bought an 18-pack this week), you don’t turn down free eggs these days!)

I did two loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, took the dogs for a short walk (where I got more pumpkin photos!), cut up chicken for the dogs’ meals, and scooped kitty litter.

ETA: I forgot to mention that I grilled burgers last night to have with the macaroni salad I made. Yum!

I visited mom and read more (some in Hapshetsup and some in two different Kindle cozies).

Temps started out at 62.7(F) and reached 90.5. So much for cooler temps. It was overcast on the way downtown, so I checked the weather app. Forecast now called for a chance of rain today and tomorrow. Whether we actually get it or not is a different story. Check back later. *g* Later: In shocking news, we did not get any rain today.

Mom Update:

Mom was still feeling weak today. ( more back here )

(no subject)

Came home from our summer holiday yesterday. We had a summer house on Funen, one of the larger Danish islands. I followed my challenge to take more pictures. Despite

rmc28's suggestions, no name really stuck. I did do it, though! I took so many pictures and some of them actually came out. Some of them turned out a bit blurry, especially the ones from the zoo. I think I'm a bit of an aggressive zoomer, but I'm only working with my phone here.

I have queued up a bunch of picture posts from our trip over on Pillowfort. The first one posted today, and I've set them up to post another every two days over there. If you want to see them, they're all public, and you can go here: https://www.pillowfort.social/PurplePrimula

If you are interested in your own account, you can use this invite link. It's multi-use.
https://pillowfort.social/users/sign_up?invite=LuuQGZlUVrJq2RByEs85mg

Entry tags:

books

Mai Ishizawa, "The Place of Shells"

Felt I was primed to respond to this one: overtly literary (published in America by New Directions) with significant speculative elements, strong sense of place in the university city of Göttingen, themes of memory and haunting, even a touch of climate (geology?) fiction through its focus on the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Not to mention the Planetenweg. I mean, have a look at these blurbs:

"An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale." — Booklist

"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief."
— Jessica Au

"The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel."
— Jenny Mustard

The premise: "In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami but has now inexplicably returned from the dead." She takes this very much in stride – or at least finds herself unable to speak about it or directly acknowledge its strangeness – but then more intrusions from the past begin to appear across the city...

What's interesting is how my genre expectations led me astray, because ultimately in its resolution I felt that Place of Shells was much more in the tradition of Japanese "healing fiction," along the lines of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. In a way it's a social-harmony-restored novel. For me that didn't work, but I often feel that I'm reading Japanese literature in slightly the wrong key, or at least without sufficient genre context.

Although the novel addresses the Holocaust, and in a way uses mentions of the Holocaust to strengthen its themes around memory, loss and haunting, it is definitely not about the Holocaust. It would be a bit churlish to object to that: this is a Japanese novel set abroad, rather than one about Germany's past. But having been reminded by the Wikipedia article about the city that Leó Szilárd and Edward Teller were on the faculty at the university before the Nazis came to power, it strikes me that this could have been a bigger book (it's very slight), perhaps in conversation with When We Cease to Understand the World, or at least with the metaphorical tsunami of the atomic bomb and its impact on Japan. Author missed a trick, perhaps?

In summary: I've never read a book that was so strongly in the tradition of WG Sebald while at the same time being so completely unlike WG Sebald. Which fascinates me.

Review by Glynne Walley
Review by Anabelle Johnston in LARB

Write every day! - August 2025 - Day 16

Tally:
Welcome post
( Days 1-10 )

Day 11:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddes47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 13:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 14:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddes47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 15:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddes47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 16:

china_shop

Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.

~ ~ ~

ysilme here: Today my writing time was eaten up by unexpected and complicated software maintenance and reinstall, but I managed to squeeze in an alibi sentence. At least the temperatures have dropped to much nicer temperatures again, and I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep. Which I need as I have a headache from the weather change.. ;op

sylvanwitch here: We arrived home a few minutes ago. Before we left the hotel for our respective adventures (I spent the afternoon at the Soldiers & Sailors museum), I wrote a 135-word travel journal entry about yesterday’s adventures.

Entry tags:

High School Survival

A recent book review by

rachelmanija reminded me of a forgotten, and now unmourned, novel I wrote somewhere between tenth and eleventh grade, about a high school that barricades itself in a "revolution" for a time. This wasthe mid-sixties, when student unrest was a news item. The escalation of the Vietnam war--the concomitant intensification of what we called the military-industrial complex--'Don't trust anyone over thirty'--no jobs for women except service (secretary, nurse, grade school teacher), and those underpaid--and meanwhile, the ferocious overcrowding caused by the world trying to squish the baby boomers into existing spaces while conveying, repeatedly, the message 'There are too many of you, you don't matter, you'll never have meaningful jobs'--you have the atmosphere.

But this high school revolution was really about the hypocrisy of teenagers using the news as theit excuse in their hierarchical battles with each other. What I was going for, in my clueless sixteen-year-old brain, was the lethal artificiality of being locked up with a few thousand of your age mates, which prepared you for. . . . what? In the workplace (or marriage, supposedly the destination for women) you weren't having to negotiate crowd of age mates suffering from the same hormonal chaos as you were.

But what came out was teenage boy violence for the sake of violence--something I knew firsthand--and the more insidious violence of mean girl crowds. My small friendship circle and I, experts at drifting into the woodwork to avoid attention, divided our gender into two groups, the indes and the pakkies. Indes--inde, for independent--were frequently the targets of the pakkies, the ones who roamed in packs, looking exactly alike in their teased behives, layers of Twiggy eye make-up, short skirts and t-strap shoes. They took over the bathrooms at every break and lunch, filling the air with hairspray and cigarette smoke, and the meanest would target any loner who dared to go in to try to pee. So you got used to holding it all day.

The novel had plenty of action, but central were the heroic indes, who of course knew how to survive, and when they didn't know what to do, they went to their retreat, the library. It all came to a satisfactory close, but I knew at the time that therre was something crucial missing, so I never typed it up and inflicted it on a New York publisher after scraping together postage from babysitting, the way I'd been doing with various other projects.

I finally gave it to a friend to rewrite, which was kinda cool, seeing what someone else would do with your story, but unsurprisingly the friend just doubled down on how great the indes were, and how stupid the rest of the kids. And so it finally went into a box, with varous other things piled on top over the years.

In culling all that old stuff, I rediscovered it. Glancing through, I wondered if there was any hope of resurrecting it as a period piece, but five minutes'perusal made it plain that it'd have to be completely gutted: the non-indes were all one type, even though on a personal level I knew better. The indes had no arc whatsoever, except in the wish fulfillment sense--they were the despised cool ones at the outset, then the heroes at the end, but Revenge of the Nerds did it better twenty years later (making me wonder if the originator of the idea was a peer). The story's potential interest would have to focus in on the pakkies, who would have to confront the very conformity they were trying to enforce. There was a possible story worth telling.

So out it went to the recycle bin. But it was fun to look back and remember the fierce pleasure I got in writing it and reinforcing the conviction that geeks are cool.

Entry tags:

brain: adhd

Live Wife Reaction: GUUURRRLLL!!!!!

On Thursday I went to Turku to take the driving theory test at the Ajovarma office. I passed! However:

I had paid in advance and scheduled this test several weeks ago. I made the reservation at home, from the computer, and immediately saved the date with a bunch of reminders in my calendar.

But when I got to the test site they didn't call my name at the appointed time. One of the desk workers asked me if I had an appointment and when she scanned my non-driver's ID card, she said, "Oh, you don't have an appointment today, but you had one yesterday!"

I had somehow managed to put the appointment in my calendar wrong, even though I thought I checked it so carefully! (I stopped myself from saying "I have ADHD!" with very great difficulty.)

She was very nice and helpful, though. She said she would reschedule my appointment and the payment would still be good; she found an opening that same day three hours later, and then when I said I could wait, she said actually the testing room wasn't full and she could let me take the test right away. So she did.

I have a total of (I think) 5 hours of driving lessons left, the first of which is in two weeks, when my instructor is back from his vacation. In the meantime, it's the second half of Wax's annual vacation starting today, and we will hopefully be trying chicken florentine for the first time this week.

The Shoo Fly came Back The Very Next Day

YUP! The breach still isn't contained!

Two more flies in a week. I took the option to consider covering the parts of the sink stand that I can more actively cover and it is now covered in vinyl siding. Taped the breaches too which look ugly but to be honest there's a lot around here at this point that is not super pretty--I really wish I could have been able to simply caulk it all. Will it work? Will I find more flies? Will I go insane when a new fly finds its way out suggesting yet another breach? Find out in the next exciting episode!

So! ( Last weekend! )

Spent most of the week doing the "recover from the vacation" while doing work. Some progress was made but I also begin the troubleshooting of "why the hell can't I figure out a permanent way for me to sleep well"

Here's the results of two nights of trial and error and many rewatches on postprod: the first photostitching I've ever done combined with many ways to attempt to clean all that light pollution.

It's a kind of image best seen in full details so here's a link to the image.
Big work in progress, but at least this helped me understand what I'm looking for. With a better opportunity to comp and figure out what I should be doing, I think this will be even better. I'll look forward to trying more often when the days grow shorter.

If I get a better result, I'm tossing this one immediately because honestly it's ugly as sin but it does emphasize a lot of what I'm trying to learn so hopefully I can only do better from here.

God help me was this a trial but at least I'm back on my normal shit. Still, not a total loss as I found out about the train museum and we got to see a steam locomotive in action; we have some shots of that. There was also a really nice bakery we hit on the way back that I felt too underdressed for but at least nobody gave a shit about what I looked like while I was there.

Anyway, that's that, off to do something real aside from bitching about this.

Entry tags:

Photos: Smokey & Sorry Face (Garage, now Deck, Cats) (with Bonus Buck!)

Here are the garage cats (who have moved to the deck for the summer, almost like snowbirds heading to Florida) making themselves comfy on the deck. They're very brave, but the dogs mostly leave them alone now that they're getting used to them.

( 10 more back here )

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The Day in Spikedluv (Friday, Aug 15)

I hit Price Chopper while I was downtown and got in a walk around the park. I also met my used bookstore friends for breakfast! (It was nice to catch up. They treated me for my birthday. They also gave me more GCs! One for the Bakery and one for my favorite local pizza place.) I hit Stewart’s on the way home (for gas and milk).

I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND folded – I’m on a roll with this!), hand-washed dishes, took Grant for a walk, cut up chicken for the dogs’ meals, scooped kitty litter, and showered. ETA: I also boiled macaroni and eggs, diced veggies, and stirred up macaroni salad.

I visited mom and called her in the evening; read more in Hatshepsut; and finished the current Kindle cozy and started another (in the same series; I might stick with this one).

Thanks to

mistressofmuses for the birthday wishes!

Temps started out at 57.6(F) and reached 84.2. It’s not in the 90s, but it still felt very hot out.

Mom Update:

Mom was still very weak and easily exhausted today. ( more back here )

Entry tags:

📸 photo: ornamental onion (and bee!)

Close-up of several purple puffball looking flowers, with a bee hunting for pollen in the middle

Wikipedia: Mouse Garlic (the variety of allium Pl@ntNet thinks this looks closest to)

Allium angulosum is a perennial herb up to 50 cm tall. Bulbs are narrow and elongated, about 5 mm in diameter. The plant produces a hemispherical umbel of small pink flowers on long pedicels.

Adding two new words to my dictionary, one sec…

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

Write every day! - August 2025 - Day 15

Tally:
Welcome post
( Days 1-10 )

Day 11:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddes47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 13:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 14:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddes47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 15:

china_shop

Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.

~ ~ ~

ysilme here: Still too hot, brain still not braining, but I got down about 1,4k of nonfic, including an alibi sentence of the new fandom drawer WIP.

sylvanwitch: Today, we had an unexpected adventure. I'm writing this from Pittsburgh, PA, which is not where I'd expected to be spending the evening. (We're fine. It's T's best friend who needed us, so we came.) After a whirlwind packing spree and four hours on the road, I've done some yoga, had my dinner, and written a travel journal entry for yesterday's adventure and also penned my annual anniversary poem for T. 400 words exactly, altogether.

Entry tags:

friday open thread

Friday open thread: unexpected kindnesses

The Friday open thread makes a hesitant return this week, after what feels like months on hiatus. My work situation was such that I completely lacked the mental energy to facilitate chatty posts, but things are slowly being restored to their previous harmony, and so I feel I can pick these posts up again.

Before I launch into the prompt, a quick note to say that I am going to close offers on The Power Within on Monday evening, 6pm UK summer time, so if you were interested in making a donation, get them in by then and let me know.

Now, onwards to the open thread: what is a recent, small-scale unexpected kindness you've received from a stranger recently? I'm not asking about life-altering genorosity, but something small, and unnecessary on the part of the giver that was nonetheless given, and brightened your day.

Mine occurred in the Gail's* at Cambridge station today. I have a habit of stopping there in between getting off my train and starting the second leg of my commute in to the library, and buying an iced coffee, as a way to gather my thoughts before the working day. This morning, rather plaintively, I asked if they had any cheese straws. I must have sounded so despondent that one of the bakers overheard and came out of the bakery into the shop front, to explain that they were still in the oven, but would be ready in about five minutes. I said I'd wait and drink my coffee and return in a few minutes to buy a cheese straw when they were ready, settled down in the cafe, and zoned out.

About five minutes later, the same baker came over with an oven-hot cheese straw in a paper bag, and when I got up to pay, he said there was no need — it was on the house. I would have been very happy to pay, but it was a lovely gesture, and certainly meant I started my Friday on a high note.

Have any of you had similar moments of kindness recently?

*Gail's is a mildly upmarket UK chain of bakery/patisseries. It's a kind of running joke that the Venn diagram of presence of a Gail's in a constituency, and the Lib Dems targetting that constituency in the last election is a circle; my town voted in a Lib Dem in 2024, and a Gail's inevitably followed a few months later.

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.

* Don't.

Entry tags:

Photos: Apple Blossoms (5/6/25)

I realized, as I looked back at my photo posts, that I never posted any photos of the apple blossoms! Granted, I was still wearing a walking shoe/boot at this time (and if I recall correctly, it was soaking wet all the time), so I couldn’t take any walks through the orchard, but the apple trees in front of the house blossomed nicely. Here are just a few pics from the early days. (All were taken on 5/6/25.)

( 8 more back here )

Entry tags:

The Day in Spikedluv (Thursday, Aug 14)

I didn’t have to do any shopping this morning, but I did go to the bank for my aunt and got in a walk around the park while I was downtown. I dropped off a book at the library on my way to visit my aunt and talked to the librarian about it (and picked up another book). I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND folded), hand-washed dishes, took Grant for a walk, cut up chicken for the dogs’ meals, and scooped kitty litter.

I visited mom, read some fanfic, finished the Kindle cozy and started another, and read more about Hatshepsut. (I have already concluded that this is not a book I’m going to be able to just sit down and read through. My plan is to read a little bit each day, and read something light in between.) I also received another GC (the Bakery) for my birthday! And tomorrow is breakfast with my used bookstore friends to round out the celebration.

Temps started out at 63.5(F) and reached 88.7. Today was supposed to be the first in a string of (supposedly) cooler days. o_O

Mom Update:

Mom was doing better than yesterday, but not great. ( more back here )

wait wait wait

What do you mean, Brandi Carlile and Belinda Carlisle are TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE???? I thought Belinda Carlisle had reinvented herself and made a comeback, what do you mean it's a completely different person.

I have not been this betrayed since finding out that Carl Sandburg and Carl Sagan were different people, but at least these are still two singers. WTF.

Write every day! - August 2025 - Day 14

Tally:
Welcome post
( Days 1-10 )

Day 11:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddes47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 13:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.

~ ~ ~

ysilme here: Alibi sentence. It's scorchingly hot and my brain isn't cooperative. ;op

sylvanwitch here: Before we left on today’s adventure, I wrote up yesterday’s in my travel journal.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Don't Stop (Fleetwood Mac)

Entry tags:

One of my favorite things about TOS: men apologizing

J and I have re-watched three seasons of TNG, and the number of times I've felt that Troi or Crusher is 100% correct and Picard in particular is being an incurious asshole are getting... let's say, numerous. And in general, they seem to get out-shouted by the male senior officers in this "we're just being reasonable while you're being emotional" way that I find intensely annoying. Even when the plot ultimately justifies their perspective, they seem to get these vague acknowledgments in a private setting, not the unqualified public apologies they frankly deserve—because, IMO, the show itself doesn't feel they deserve them.

Meanwhile, when we marathoned TOS, I was pretty surprised by how much I ended up liking Kirk, and then I ended up loving him even more on some re-watches, despite the occasional dire writing ("Elaan of Troyius" can't make me hate him; my most beloathèd writer on TOS just decided that, in addition to writing Elaan as an unholy combination of Katharina from The Taming of the Shrew and just a racist caricature in general, Kirk was going to be Petruchio for a day and also that it'd be hot if France Nuyen roofied and had sex with him, which is, um, rape, but the episode doesn't understand its own plot the way e.g. "Wink of an Eye" or even freaking "Catspaw" understand what's wrong—and it was written by the same guy who wrote the virulently antisemitic "Patterns of Force" that goes out of its way to put Kirk and Spock in Nazi uniforms—just them among the main cast for most of the episode, for some reason, though it's unusual for them to be placed on a mission alone—and the script includes extra antisemitism directed individually at both Nimoy and Shatner on different occasions). There are a lot of reasons that TOS Kirk in particular ended up as my peak ST blorbo, even surpassing Spock's hold on my heart (though I love him deeply), but one of the reasons are scenes like these that TNG has very definitely brought back to mind:

KIRK: At least try cutting him off!
UHURA: Sir, if I could cut him off, don’t you think I—!
RILEY: ♪ I’ll take you home again, Kathleen— ♪
UHURA: Yes, sir, I’ll keep trying.
KIRK [apologetically]: Sorry.

KIRK: Yes, I’m aware of that, Mr. Scott.
CHEKOV: And, sir, the fact Earth took twelve centuries doesn’t mean they had to.
UHURA: We’ve seen different development rates on different planets.
SCOTT: And were the Klingons behind it, why didn’t they give them breechloaders?
CHEKOV: Or machine guns?
UHURA: Or old-style hand lasers?
KIRK [sharply]: I did not invite a debate. [pause] I’m sorry. I’m worried about Spock and concerned about what’s happened.

These apologies are quite simple, not emotional or dramatic or detailed at all, but that's fine. Just the acknowledgment that he was in the wrong and apologizing for it without hesitation or taking it to a face-saving private location or whatever, just saying it right there in front of everyone, is incredibly refreshing. In both of these, also, Uhura is one of the people he's responding to—it's possible that he's readier to apologize in such an open and unambiguous way because Uhura is involved and they're particularly close (their obvious and consistent mutual affection was another of the big TOS surprises!). I don't really think so (McCoy also freely apologizes on the spot multiple times, if less often than his behavior merits), but maybe Kirk's apologies are prompted by Uhura's involvement. However, if so, TOS going out of its way to show a very white-coded male hero publicly and correctly apologizing to the competent and justified Black woman who answers to him in front of his other subordinates doesn't make it any less welcome tbh.

(I'm definitely enjoying parts of TNG, but if several of the TOS movies frustrated me by moving towards 80s space explosions blockbuster when I was invested in the Having Things to Say Even if They're Deeply Flawed approach of TOS along with the visual experimentation, generally unexpected nuances of the characters, and sheer joyous camp of it all, TNG has seemed so painfully complacent 80s and essentially cautious in its fundamental perspective that I miss TOS all the more, its many faults notwithstanding.)