superborb | Reading

Eating: This weekend is

scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.)

Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.

I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far.

Watching: Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that,

scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.

Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to

wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as

scruloose and

wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.

We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4.

wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.

But last week,

scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.

dolorosa_12

This is going to be a fairly short catch up, in spite of all the things that have been going on. I don't think I've posted properly on Dreamwidth for several weeks — but I have been massively busy. This weekend is the first time in quite a while that I've felt relaxed and not as if I were lacking in huge quantities of sleep.

My mum, and then sister #1 arrived to visit. Mum will be back (she's doing her usual multiple-month European summer holiday), but my sister just stayed for a few days. Currently the pair of them are in Italy, wandering around beautiful places (which I envy) in 35-degree heat (which I don't).

My sister's time in the UK coincided with Beyoncé's London concerts, and she asked if I wanted to go if she covered the costs (she's always wanted to see Beyoncé in concert and had never had the opportunity since she doesn't tour Australia any more) and dealt with all the palaver of sitting online refreshing the ticketing website when they went live. So now I can cross 'attend massive stadium concert' off my list of cultural experiences. The London weather did not cooperate (although fortunately our seats were under cover), but that didn't stop procedings: nine outfit changes, incredible band and dancers, lots of theatre and pyrotechnics, and of course music and stage presence enough to fill that vast space. I wouldn't say it's my favourite way to experience live music (I like gigs in weird little clubs with thirty other people), but I'm glad I went.

We only got home after midnight, and I then went out the next night to the silent disco ('90s music-themed this time) with Matthias, so I was completely exhausted.

Beyond that, my family's visit involved a lot of good food (my sister took me out for a meal at this place as a fortieth birthday present, she, Mum, Matthias and I went to this place for lunch, etc), some wandering around London, and a chance to see the excellent British Library exhibition on the history of gardening in the UK.

Unfortunately, my sister also brought her Australian germs with her, and I was then horrendously sick with a cold for most of last week, recovering just in time to head over to Worcester for a conference. Refreshingly, this was the first library or educational conference I've attended in several years that wasn't completely dominated by the topic of generative AI (indeed it didn't even get mentioned until one of the questions asked of the presenter of the final presentation), which was nice. I returned home on Friday, immediately cancelled my classes at the gym for Saturday, and collapsed in exhaustion.

My most recent reading (with the exception of Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum) has been decidedly mediocre, and I think the combination of my low tolerance for a) poor editing and copyediting and b) 'cosy' fiction is going to lead me to be a lot more cautious in picking up any currently hyped SFF (especially fantasy) unless I am already familiar with the author. I came to the realisation after reading two such disappointing books in quick succession that although I love stories which involve a lot of domesticity, cosiness just does not work for me, since it seems to currently translate as no conflict (or the kinds of conflict that are easily resolved by a conversation, or a character spontaneously offering help with nothing previously building to that point). Hopefully I'll make better book choices after this previous run.

I think it's possibly fair to say that I want cosy cottagecore in my own life, and not in my fiction!

china_shop

Does anyone know where referring to diamonds dismissively as "the most boring form of carbon" is from? We picked it up somewhere (movie, tv, or book), and now we can't even remember if it was an ordinary character being geeky and pedantic, or a supernatural being eye-rolling at a human.

It could even have been Douglas Adams, except then I'm pretty sure a) I'd be able to identify it, and/or b) it would come up in an internet search.

sophia_sol

I'm aphantasic - I do not and cannot create pictures in my mind's eye. My mind does not have an eye. But there have been just a few times very recently where in the first moments upon waking in the morning, there's an image in my mind and I feel like I can SEE it. Like, see it see it! As if I were looking at it with my eyes! It always vanishes within a few moments, but my god, is that a glimpse into what it's like to NOT be aphantasic??

Now, though, I'm wondering which of several things is true:

1. Am I weirdly suddenly able to access a tiny amount of picturing things, out of nowhere?

Or

2. Is the dreamy confusion of waking up making me *feel* like I'm picturing things but not *actually* picturing things? It lasts so briefly that I actually can't be sure!

Or

3. Have I always genuinely able to picture things in my sleep, but not awake, but because I only conscsiously experience dreams through the medium of remembering them, I've never been able to tell that - and a change in recent sleeping habits means I have been holding on to a snatch of a dream just long enough to get the sense of it with my waking mind?

Or something else????

Anyway these brief snatches of mind-pictures have been a baffling thing to experience, as something I've never previously been able to do in my life ever, and all of a sudden I'm a little more of a true believer that other people DO do this thing all the time!

It always seemed so fake to me before. So made up. How could a person PICTURE things?! That's just a metaphor, surely! We're using words about images to describe the experience of thinking about a thing, because the actual experience of thinking is so unlike anything in the physical world that there are no words to describe it! Right? Right????

I guess for lots of people, they literally are creating pictures in their head with their brains, all the time.

WILD.

Now I really wish I had a better way to explain what my experience of thinking is like, tbh. Because all I have is metaphor, to translate it into words! But those metaphors are apparently concrete factual experiences to other people, so I won't be successfully communicating!

This is similar to my experience with words, btw. I *can* think in words, more than I can with pictures, but that's me deliberately creating the words and sentences. I'm translating my thoughts into words with conscious effort.

My thoughts aren't words. My thoughts aren't pictures. My thoughts are thoughts!

How are so many people's thoughts NOT just thoughts!

goss

Title: Jim
Artist:

goss
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Character: Jim Jimenez
Rating: G
Content Notes: For

drawesome Challenge #71 - Pride!. Digital drawing of Jim, an awesome non-binary character on Our Flag Means Death, using the non-binary flag colours yellow, white, purple and black. I was also inspired by the ceaseless fluidity and flow of the wide open ocean. :)

Preview:
Jim Jimenez

( Click here for entire artwork )

umadoshi

After making calls on Monday,

scruloose found a heat pump-servicing company that would do the repair etc. under our warranty from the manufacturer. A service tech turned up on Wednesday (!) at the time he said he'd be here (!) and assessed the situation, sourced the required parts locally (all three units needed their coils replaced, which the manufacturer apparently says was a known issue with models from that year that has now been fixed, so this theoretically shouldn't recur), and came back first thing yesterday morning to actually do the repair (and replace a noisy fan in the exterior unit). Labor and parts=all covered. Things seem to be working fine now. *knocks wood* It was a bizarrely good experience.

The cats were unsurprisingly unimpressed about being corralled in the bedroom repeatedly (both to keep them underfoot and to minimize their covid exposure as much as possible, in addition to all the purifiers running and

scruloose rigging the airflow so that the bedroom was pressurized and the tech wearing an N95 mask the entire time), but were mostly polite about it and appreciated the treats they got afterwards.

I just went poking around in the Kobo listings for Adrian Tchaikovsky ebooks, and stumbled over the fact that there's an ebook (Terrible Worlds: Revolutions) collecting his three Terrible Worlds novellas, none of which I've read and one of which is on my wishlist. The collected volume is going for $7.99 Canadian. The individual novellas go for $10.99 each. [EDIT: Regular prices, in all cases.] I don't have a specific way in mind that I think this should be handled, but surely there are better ways to price/label/offer ebooks.

The poking around came after the ebook for Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which Ginny just read and liked, turned up on the on-sale list this morning, so this is also a PSA about that. (At least for the Canadian Kobo site.)

marthawells

* Interview with Sue Chan, the production designer:

https://filmstories.co.uk/news/murderbot-designing-a-future-world-that-doesnt-look-like-alien/

“I started out by taking the most ancient societies on each continent – Etruscans, Asian, European, and African cultures,” Chan tells us. “I looked at the most fundamental motifs and gathered them into a bible, then asked my team to imagine 100 generations from now, when the diaspora of Earth have chosen to live together in society. How would they evolve a unified set of symbols? A language that really honours where they came from.”

This informed the alphabet that can be seen in the decoration painted across the otherwise grey, corporate habitat the PresAux crew are leasing. At the same time, acknowledging how much of the crew is queer and polyamorous, the colours of the rainbow are also entwined into their decorations.

“All of that is mashed up but it has a fundamental logic to it,” says Chan.

* Interview with Akshay Khanna (Ratthi):

https://squaremile.com/style/akshay-khanna-murderbot-actor-interview/

I’m incredibly excited for people to watch Murderbot on Apple TV+. Sci-fi has been my favourite genre by a country mile forever, and being on a show like this has always been a career goal of mine. Frankly, I had too much fun filming that show, and getting paid to do it constantly felt like I was getting away with something on set.

And the show is just so good. I can confidently say it’s fantastic – and if you don’t like it, then I would gently tell you that it’s OK to be wrong sometimes.

* Interview with Sabrina Wu (Pin-Lee):

https://www.autostraddle.com/sabrina-wu-interview-murderbot/

And then once I got the role, I read the books and I was legit just blown away at how funny the books were. I just haven’t seen such a dry sarcastic sensibility with this kind of hero sci-fi stories. And then I also just really liked that it was in the tradition of I felt like Octavia Butler, where it’s like, “oh, this is a queer imagining of the future.” So I don’t know. I just thought it was a really sweet, funny, different world. I also, obviously every comedian who becomes an actor, their dream is to get to work on something with action to move beyond an It’s Always Sunny kind of comedy. I believe there was already an opportunity for me to be in a spaceship and shoot guns, and it just made me happy that it was genuinely funny source material.

* Video interview with Tattiawna Jones (Arada) and Tamara Podemski (Bharadwaj):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NllgfEekw9s

* And a video interview with Noma Dumezweni (Mensah)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZpigqUqZXQ

* and a video interview with Noma and David Dastmalchian (Gurathin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=361cKOujISE

* And a video interview (with a transcript) with Alexander Skarsgard, Jack McBrayer, and Paul and Chris Weitz:

https://collider.com/murderbot-alexander-skarsgard-jack-mcbrayer-creators-paul-weitz-chris-weitz/

* And there is a profile of me in The New Yorker (!!)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/do-androids-dream-of-anything-at-all

halfcactus

Fanvid set to Mao Buyi's 借/Borrowing: In which Luo Weizhao borrows bits of everything to keep Pei Su safe and warm.

Clips were sourced from eps 1–27, with major spoilers for up to episode 16.

CW: flashing lights at around 1:00

Watch on YouTube

Also on: AO3 / Tumblr

( Translation notes )

lirazel

Dear Author,

It's been a few years since I've been able to participate in this exchange and I've missed it! I am generally quite easy to please so long as you avoid my DNWs, so I hope you enjoy writing a fic for me!

I've got a bunch of different pairings/OT3s with different preferences for each. The one thing that I most want for all of them is that the requested pairing/OT3 fall in love by the end of the story (if they aren't in love already) and a reasonably happy ending. By "reasonably" happy, I mean, the situation around them can be kind of dark, but they're together and that's what matters.

The first most important DNW is: infidelity. I am just not here for that.

I'm totally fine with people having pasts in which they loved/were with/were married to other people but by the time the characters get together, I want them both to be single. Or, in the case of an OT3 where two thirds of the characters are married to each other, they both need to be enthusiastic about inviting a third member into the relationship.

Some other DNWS:

+ PWP. Porn is fine, I just don't want the porn to be all the fic is. And porn is in no way necessary--you can write the most rated G fic ever if you like. I love all ratings equally.
+ Instalove/love at first sight (for anyone other Wangxian--infatuation at first site is okay for them--or Peter falling in love with Harriet because canon). As an ace person, it's super important to me that characters actually know each other before they fall in love.
+ Modern AUs of historical/fantasy fandoms. Canon divergence/what ifs are amazing, though, and if you want to twist the setting a little bit (giving Hodel magical powers or making Lan Wangji emperor or something), go for it. I just do not want to read about any of these historical/fantasy characters working in a coffee shop.
+ Major character deaths (unless someone comes back to life à la Wei Wuxian)
+ Character bashing
+ Unmitigated fluff (some fluff is fine! But I'd like some deeper feelings to dig into.)
+ Onscreen noncon
+ Focus on babies/children
+ Watersports/scat
+ BDSM outside the bedroom

General likes: angst, especially if it ends happily; getting together; hurt/comfort; mutual pining; in character characters; complicated relationships between women; good worldbuilding; longfic; outsider povs; location/setting as character; political intrigue; forced proximity; good people trying to do the right thing; bad people trying to do the right thing; found families; siblings; porn with feelings; character A having to rescue/defend character B; total devotion/us against the world dynamics. I also love the other characters in these canons, so bringing them into the fic in large supporting roles is great!

Now onto the requests.

( The Queen's Thief )

( Six of Crows )

( Fiddler on the Roof film )

( The Untamed )

( Shadow of the Moon )

( Spinning Silver )

( Life with Derek )

( Lord Peter Wimsey series )

philomytha

So last year I got a couple of the French Biggles comics for my amusement, but I haven't written any of them up properly. This one is probably of most interest to at least some of you, being a proper Biggles vs von Stalhein adventure with a fairly lively plot (the other one, promisingly titled Biggles contre von Stalhein, actually only has a little bit of EvS, admittedly commanding the palace guard in a South American revolution where Biggles is on the side of the revolutionaries, but with only a few appearances in the story). Anyway, I gave my French a workout to read them. This one, incidentally, is the one where the drawing of EvS with that colourful cravat comes from: the artist has clearly heard that he's a snappy dresser and is having fun with it. It's also the one where Biggles and EvS very nearly get shipwrecked together. In general the plot only makes sense if you don't think about anything at all, but it is very well equipped with explosions, vehicular adventures, dramatic escapes, chases and secret bases, so who cares :-D

( Biggles retrouve von Stalhein in detail )

sophia_sol

one

thinking about how as a kid I found zoos super boring - and I think my problem was that, at least at that time, the expected mode of engagement with zoos was to stare at animals and be amazed at how interesting/cute/different they look?

for me, learning context is what makes an animal compelling! eg: I did a project on temperate rainforests in grade 6, and learned about banana slugs as part of the ecosystem. and subsequently loved them, even though I hadn't cared about slugs previously! if I'd been shown a real live banana slug after having done that project, I would have been fascinated to just watch it, because I would understand what I was seeing, and know what to look for in its behaviour and appearance to connect with the things I knew about it!

if the zoos I visited in my youth had done more to contextualise my understanding of what I was seeing, I think I could have had a good time. but instead I was presented with a few fun facts and the opportunity to see the animals, the end. and so I found them the height of boredom.

fun facts are useless to me! WHY are they fun! what makes this fact relevant! what caused things to be this way!!

(I had a similar problem with most museums. except dinosaur museums, to which I came with my own contextual knowledge, and thus could appreciate and enjoy the things on display, even when the display didn't provide much information itself)

two

oh!!! there's a plugin for joplin that allows android app users to see wordcount! and also to see line numbers, to make it easier to orient yourself within a long note! I love this

three

several podcasts I follow do reviews of older SFF novels (either occasionally or as their whole thing), and it has me thinking again about a type of story I think used to be more common in western genre fiction, and it's one I rather miss.

The type I mean: a narrative which is checking in on a specific place or people-group at different points in its long-term history, where the overarching narrative project is on a scale of eras while telling smaller personal stories within that history.

Sometimes it's done within the context of a single book, like in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes it's between books over the length of a series, like in the Dragonriders of Pern series¹. Either way, you get to see the cycles of history, the way that things which seem urgent and current at one point become historicised and mythologised, and become the ancient context for the new urgent current events, whether the people involved realise it or not. I love this shit! I love context. I love seeing how things connect. I love how the very notion of history becomes one of the major characters in the narrative!

From what I see, the modern western sff genre has become more interested in more immediate stories. Which have their benefits too, and which are really wonderful in their own way! And there's plenty about these older stories that I do not miss at all.

Maybe there are authors out there writing era-spanning sff today, and I just haven't come across them because there are other aspects of what those authors focus on that are super not to my tastes, or because the book is a small indie publishing situation that doesn't have good word-of-mouth, or something else like that....these are definitely possible! But I do miss getting invested in this kind of story. It's fun!

¹I won't say that all the books I once loved that do this thing were GOOD books

four

the names people choose - for themselves, their kids, their pets - is soooo interesting to me! but especially kids' names, tbh.

modern western culture places so much emphasis on the importance of the choice you make about your baby's name (compared to, say, the late middle ages, when half of all people in england were named one of the same few names) and since there's so much cultural weight on the choice, and it is by its nature a very public choice, you can tell a lot from the decisions people make!

what were their priorities, their influences, their values? what kind of naming community are they in, and how much does it fall in line with the rest of their country? so many factors go into each choice!

every time someone I know has a new kid, I'm always SO eager to find out the name...and then, if possible, get the story behind why they chose it! It's always so interesting!

five

recently I was out birding with some folks who have never been birding before, and one of them commented that they were delighted to discover from me that an important part of birding is complimenting every bird you see

and it's TRUE. it is an important part of birding! telling the birds what a great job they're doing, how cute/handsome/gorgeous they are, etc is something I am ALWAYS doing. instinctively and automatically. and I am so pleased to be modelling this attitude to others! :D

osprey_archer

Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.

chestnut_pod

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The Crow, The Owl and the Dove by Nightwish

china_shop

Haha, I just signed up for a free online Harvard course on a whim,[1] and having spent the last few months in the Three Billion Comments Club on

sid_guardian, naturally I'm diligently replying to people's comments in the discussion sections of the course, too. What could possibly go wrong?

(You don't have to reply to everyone, china! This is not your circus! /o\)

[1] Someone on my flist pointed out a while ago that there are a bunch of free online courses.

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the hair, there, and everywhair poll, 78% of respondents said they air dry, 35.6% towel dry roughly, 30.5% towel dry carefully / squeezingly, and 22% use a hair dryer or other device. (I towel dry carefully / squeezingly, then air dry. But I have thick, slow-drying hair, and I can’t sleep with it wet, so I use a hair dryer occasionally.)

In ticky-boxes, “a yawning cat broadcasting calm and satisfaction into the world” beat hugs, 71.2% to 67.8%! The power of ~~toxiplasmosis~~ cats on the internet! Thirty-six point two percent of respondents agreed that other people are, generally speaking, quite mysterious. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander (The Chronicles of Prydain) -- Welsh children’s fantasy, and the first book in the trilogy that Disney’s The Black Cauldron is loosely based on. I’m not far into this yet, I haven’t read it before, and I've misplaced my kindle. But it starts well.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, narrated by Robert Bathurst -- This ripped along very engagingly. I like that Whimsy isn’t falling over bodies left, right and centre à la Jessica Fletcher; he has to actually seek out cases, and I appreciated his sporting enthusiasm at the outset, and also that he feels it when his actions have consequences. Also, I loved the spinster assistant, Katharine Climpson -- I hope for more of her. (And I just spoiled myself for that on wikipedia, oops, but anyway, good to know she’ll be back.) Is it the Bellona Club next, or am I missing one?

Guardian by priest -- The readalong continues, along with its sixty million comments each week. :D

Argh, I got distracted and still haven’t finished or commented on the rest of the 520 Day collection. Note to self!!

Kdramas
Nada.

Other TV
Department Q -- We finished off the 9-episode season earlier this week. It’s rather messy (not all the mysteries and loose ends get tied up), and there are a few different flavours of police violence (messed-up cop losing control; very controlled cop “extracting” information; but not group or institutionalised/authorised violence that I recall), as well as the bad guys torturing the victim. If the season had been longer, I might have bailed. But it is very compelling, and Morck (Matthew Goode) is extremely watchable.

Doctor Who -- I think I’m just not the target audience for RTD’s style of story-telling. I’m really going to miss Gatwa on my screen, though.

Stick -- the first episode of Owen Wilson’s new Apple+ golf dramedy. It was okay. Good cast, but the problem with a show about golf is the lack of ~team~. I’m reserving judgement.

El Eternauta -- we’ve finished episode 2 now. It’s fascinatingly creepy. Has a pretty bleak view of human nature, but I’m intrigued to see where it goes. (I was advised to start it with as few spoilers as possible, so I know nothing. Please don’t tell me anything!)

Also, more Murderbot, Poker Face, and Turning Point: The Vietnam War.

Guardian/Fandom
Mostly I’ve just been doing the Guardian novel readalong, the Guardian drama polls, and allllll the discussion that goes along with them. ♥ ♥ ♥

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, and several episodes of Coherent, a podcast focusing on our Deputy Prime Minister's move to set up a sort-of equivalent of DOGE and turn us into a libertarian hellhole. Gah! (Locals, submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill close on 1pm, Monday 23rd June.)

Writing/making things
Plugging away. Yesterday I posted a flashfic that I started in March last year. The first draft didn’t work and was wildly misguided (thanks to my beta for helping me realise that!), but I dusted it off and rebuilt it over the weekend, and I like how it turned out. I have a couple of other things in the works, too, and one day I’ll actually finish this ridiculous 13k-so-far gen fic. At least I’ve worked out why it was losing momentum, to wit, the longer a “missing scene” is, the more it needs to have its own build and climax, rather than relying on canon or narrative irony for the payoff. Unfortunately, the upshot of that is that I need an actual plot development.

I spent Monday’s writers’ hour looking for two story titles, and came up with one I really liked that doesn’t fit either fic. So I guess I also need to write a story to fit that title.

Life/health/mental state things
Optometrist and GP (for a laundry list of minor questions) this week. Both went fine. The weather is bitterly cold. I’ve been a bit headachy, but I’m mostly putting that down to needing new glasses.

Goals
Huh. I wonder if I should make some.

Link dump
Operation Spiderweb (wikipedia link; Ukraine’s strategic drone strike on Russia’s air capability) | From cat urine to gunpowder: Exploring the peculiar smells of outer space | Dynasty's Gay Journey - Killer Dads, Shoulderpads, and the Kiss that Rocked Hollywood (Youtube, 33:25, via a comment at

tv_talk). I have too many tabs open to rootle out more right now.

Good things
Writing. Writers’ hour. Beta. Guaaaardian. Chocolate. Cat. Andrew.

Poll #33240 The Tower

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45

View Respondents

What kind of princess is in the tower?

View Answers

goblin princess
11 (24.4%)

elf princess
8 (17.8%)

vampire princess
6 (13.3%)

mermaid princess
4 (8.9%)

minotaur princess
15 (33.3%)

dragon princess
22 (48.9%)

troll princess
4 (8.9%)

orc princess
7 (15.6%)

cat
28 (62.2%)

other
4 (8.9%)

actually it's another-gendered member of royalty
17 (37.8%)

ticky-box full of intending to bake but not getting around to it
20 (44.4%)

ticky-box full of still resisting multi-focal lenses
7 (15.6%)

ticky-box of a squadron of rescue dragons who can exhale fire or water, as required
28 (62.2%)

ticky-box of clumsy fledgling puppies, tumbling all over each other out of the nest
21 (46.7%)

ticky-box of spoiler fairies leaving them under your pillow
12 (26.7%)

ticky-box full of hugs
31 (68.9%)

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A reread of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I had intended to reread Through the Looking-Glass, too, but to my distress I found that I no longer enjoyed the absurdism of the first book (maybe politics have imitated art a little too hard in this area recently?), so it seemed pointless to subject myself to the second as well.

Maybe I’ll give it another go in a decade or two and find that I’ve come back around to enjoying it again.

What I’m Reading Now

A little bit of this and a little bit of that, but nothing that merits a progress report right now. My attention has been mostly taken up with the exigencies of a plumbing crisis, alas.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to bring me Evelina!

china_shop

Title: Raw Nerves, Old Scars (5967 words) [Teen and Up]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Relationships: Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei & Ye Zun, Da Qing & Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei, Chu Shuzhi, Da Qing
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, (sort of), (except Ye Zun), Anger, effects of past trauma, Complicated Relationships, Poly Relationships, Shen Wei misses his didi, Zhao Yunlan hates Ye Zun, Zhao Yunlan is triggered, Loyalty, Friendship, Sharing Clothes, Unreliable Narration
Series: Part 3 of Breakage and Repair 'verse (CSZ/SW/ZYL)

Summary: Feel the anger and do it anyway.

I started this for the Anger prompt last year, and finished it (15 minutes after the deadline /o\) for the Charity prompt. Ha!

queenlua

Last migration season, I subscribed to this nifty newsletter by a PhD student at UCLA—an "Early Bird Arrival Forecast" that sends personalized emails based on your location, and tells you which birds are early/peaking/late migrants in your area. It's data that I probably could figure out via other sources, but I suspect the data backing his emails is superior, and his simple summary & targeted recommendations were very handy for me to get a sense of what I might see in the field—"ooh, warbling vireos are peaking this week; let's go find one!"

Anyway. I enjoyed his recommendations again this migration season, and also, ngl his final email of the season this year weirdly made me tear up a bit:

There are no birds forecast for this week or last week, so it's time to close down the Early Bird Forecast for your region. Very sad :(

Thank you so much for participating in the second season of the Early Bird Forecast! A few asks from me before you go:

[. . .]

2. Last year, I provided a link for people to donate to me personally (AKA to "buy me a coffee"). In light of recent realized and proposed cuts to government-funded science programs, this year I would like to steer people towards donating to nonprofits that do efficient and important conservation work at home and abroad. A few good charities in this mold are Birdlife International, The American Bird Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy. If you would like to look for something more local, check out your city or region's Audubon chapter.

3. If donating is out of the question for you, consider contacting your representatives and let them know that you believe federally-funded science is worth supporting. The Early Bird Forecast is actually a by-product of a NASA-funded research fellowship I received in graduate school. If the current administration's proposed budget becomes law, funding for NASA-funded research like mine will decrease by over 50%. This science funding is cheap in the grand scheme of things – If you are the average taxpayer, you paid $0.0006 for my research (thank you!). Plus you get Early Bird Forecast for free, what a steal!

Happy Summer!

god knows a phd student could always use some spare change; incredibly classy of him to point towards Science As A Whole rn instead.

something something "he's not giving up & i'm not either" etc

extrapenguin

I did, in fact, make a premiere for

vidukon_cardiff! Despite moving internationally. (I have, alas, been kind of busy after it as well, and my commute is horrible by my standards now, but I'll make a post about my experience ... later this month!) Here's the vid:

Watch on YouTube

I also spoke on the Premieres Timeline Show & Tell panel, hosted by

marah_sarie! I revealed that, due to this whole "moving internationally" thing, I had not had the time to make a vid, and a week before the deadline, I was feeling a bit :( about it. I went through the short songs in my music library but wasn't feeling very inspired, so on the Sunday, I decided to give up and instead add song length information to my giant music spreadsheet. Then, when I got to B, I came across a song where I'd already had a concept for a Rey vid back in 2023 (back when all I knew of the OT and ST was through osmosis, lol) and, as I already had all the clips, I decided I'd be doing that. I've lost the planning post-it, but on Tuesday evening, I wrote down something roughly like this:

intro - Order 66
verse 1 - Rey alone on Jakku
bridge 1 - Rey in the outpost on Jakku
chorus 1 - Finn can't train her
verse 2 - Luke won't train her
bridge 2 - temptation of Kylo
chorus 2 - Kylo won't train her
instrumental - Leia dies on her
chorus 3 - Palpatine won'ẗ train her

( more talk, incl. on the miracle of clipping )

In retrospect, there are a few places where I would like to adjust the timing or add an extra clip to make the tempo of the edits better match the tempo of the music, but, well. I did accidentally play myself into making a vid album (Beyond the Black, self-titled album) so this can be the single version and the album version can be a bit tweaked.

(Also, the album includes a Game of Thrones fansong. halp wtf am I supposed to do with that)

umadoshi

Cat Herding: Our beloved Jinksy!bear turned twelve on Saturday. Twelve! He's (by a margin of a good few years) the second-oldest cat I've ever had, and continues to be just the sweetest, softest boy. May he be with us in good health for years to come.

It was also Claudia's birthday, of course, and I always think of her on their birthday. Oh, my darling baby cat.

*The oldest was Jenny, the cat of my childhood who was still with my parents for years after I moved out. She made it to nineteen, most of that time in rock-solid health, and never really forgave me for moving to Toronto and thus straight-up vanishing from her life for months at a time.

Reading: I finished reading Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, which remained an interesting read right through, and read Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, which I think is only the second thing of his I've read? (Elder Race is the other one I'm sure of.) Having finished it, I'm in a position that's annoyingly familiar, where I liked the book quite a bit and am curious about what happens next, but am not sure I cared enough that I'll ever actually get around to picking up the sequel.

(The thing where I've almost entirely been reading books I own for years now doesn't really help, where I've often picked up the first book of a trilogy of series or whatever on sale in ebook because I've heard it's good, and then am not sure I'm invested enough to pay full price on the next one when I own literally hundreds of yet-unread books. Feh.)

Watching:

scruloose and I are up to date on Murderbot and have seen the first episode of Kingdom season 2.

In the case of the former, I'm skeptical about the nqqvgvba bs n punenpgre jub qbrfa'g nccrne va gur obbxf ng nyy--juvpu V'z abg vaureragyl ntnvafg, tvira gung gur fubj vf pyrneyl vgf bja guvat, naq V'z thrffvat fur'f gurer gb pbairl fbzrguvat gung jbhyq'ir orra gevpxl gb qb gur fnzr jnl va guvf sbezng nf va gur abiryyn. Ohg fur'f naablvat, naq V'yy cebonoyl xrrc svaqvat ure naablvat jurgure fur vf va snpg freivat jung V pheeragyl guvax vf ure cebonoyr shapgvba (rarzl ntrag znfdhrenqvat nf nyyl) be fbzrguvat zber vagrerfgvat. [ROT13] Guess we'll find out soon!

Working: Thank goodness the manga I'm working right now is (as usual) a fairly easy rewrite and not a tight deadline, because scrounging the mental energy for freelance work has been frustratingly hard recently. I'm almost halfway through my draft and have about a week and a half left with it, so it's fine, but. :/

Weathering/Householding: We've had a lot of gray days and some high-ish temperatures combined with humidity (which I hate), and the air quality, while not remotely as bad as it is in a lot of places, has been fluctuating significantly...and the AC function of the heat pumps is essentially nonfunctional. >.< This is crappy timing, given how much of the time over the last several days has required having the windows closed (and the air purifiers running for good measure, although they don't address some of the nastiness from wildfire smoke). And for bonus fun, while the heat pumps are still under warranty, the company we bought them from went under a few months ago, which complicates things. (I think possibly the main person died. :/)

That said,

scruloose made a bunch of calls today and we have reason to hope that someone can come in and take a look at them soon, if that particular company has the parts in stock. And while it's been uncomfortably warm inside some of the time because of this, at least it's not full summer yet. Hopefully we can get things dealt with by the time summer heat arrives in earnest.

And on a purely pleasant note, a couple nights ago we were in a phase of "somehow the air quality is fine outside right now, so we can just open the windows and run fans" while it was pleasantly cool and raining atmospherically and the wind was doing a wonderful job of wafting the smell of the lilacs into the living room.