Beta wanted: Sinners

Jul. 23rd, 2025 09:25 pm
resonant: Ray Kowalski (Due South) (Default)
[personal profile] resonant
Anybody want to beta 400 words of light-as-air Sinners genfic?

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Jul. 23rd, 2025 06:22 pm
sage: a white coffee cup full of roasted coffee beans (coffee)
[personal profile] sage
Expandbooks (Oken, Hope, Tarnas, Hamaker-Zondag) )

yarning
no yarn group this week. I was all showered and dressed and ready to go, and boom, migraine. Apparently my pulse skyrocketed to 144 when just out of the shower, so that triggered the migraine. Stupid hEDS.

healthcrap
Had a useless appt with physical medicine Monday, where they put me on the Hypermobile Spectrum Disorder spectrum, instead of doing a full exam for hEDS. Irritating. They also confirmed that they couldn't help me, since I don't need further PT or equipment (like a walker or wheelchair) at this time. HSD is basically the same thing, but you don't meet the diagnostic criteria of hEDS. I wish I'd been up to arguing with them, but I wasn't. Also, still haven't worked out. :(

dirt
I watered the plants today for the first time in over 3 weeks, which means I've been taking my terrible mood out on the innocents in my household. I hope I haven't lost any, but it's the (moderate) depression's fault if I have. At least I did get them watered. That's something.

#resist
August 2: 50501 Rage Against the Regime National Protest
August 3: first Move On "Won't Back Down" rally.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

been a while

Jul. 23rd, 2025 03:43 pm
the_shoshanna: my boy kitty (Default)
[personal profile] the_shoshanna
It's always been a while. I wish I posted more regularly. And who is to blame for that, I ask you me?

Yesterday Geoff and I went kayaking for the first time this year -- almost; he went with a friend last weekend while I went hiking with a different friend, but this was my first time this season and our first time together. This was also my first time with my new kayak! He wanted to upgrade our kayaks but couldn't find one he fitted comfortably in, so in the end I got a shiny new one -- longer and lighter than my old one, cuts through the water more cleanly -- and he is taking my old one, which although a bit clunky is still lighter than his old one. He's trying to sell his old one, but no bites so far, apparently. Anyway, we got out on the water for two hours and saw goslings, and cygnets, and even a baby loon with its mama! We've only seen a loon once before, so that was really special. (The chick was swimming on its own, not riding on its mom.) Also, the first clutch of cygnets we saw were young enough that one parent huddled at the edge of the reeds with them while the other came out to meet us and warn us off; when Geoff got a little closer than it liked, it rushed him with great flapping wings! No actual contact, but the message was clear and we rapidly paddled away. The second clutch we saw were a little older and were out on the water in an adorable toddling line between the parents, and we were able to pass by them rather closer than we'd been to the first family without anybody getting upset.

(Loon chicks don't seem to have a special name? We tried to think of one: Geoff suggested "lunatics" and I counterproposed "lunettes," French for "glasses.")

I've just finished going through the most recent season of Yellowjackets for the second time, since I've been watching it with two friends on slightly offset schedules. It continues to keep me riveted without being what I'd call "a good show"? I love how Shauna has been slowly revealed (yes, I know it's probably more like "how the writers have slowly changed their minds about Shauna" but I'm living in Watsonia here, okay) and we keep hoping that all the spouses and kids are safely off somewhere starting a mutual support and therapy group, never to be seen again. I'm dying to know where Melissa will turn up next, and what Jeff and Cally are going to do. (Poor Jeff and Cally.) I'm still not entirely sure which Taissa we've been seeing all season. And I love it when the teen and adult versions of the characters get to interact. I admire how the show has managed to hedge its bets on the supernatural-or-not? question for so long (I hope it's not), I'm delighted that we've finally wrapped around to the beginning of the show, and I really hope the mystery of the weird symbol does get explained in the end. The show was originally planned for five seasons, but it's hard to see how they could keep it going that long; I will be quite content if they wrap it up in the fourth season, especially since the alternative will be biting my nails hoping they actually get a fifth! I just hope they do actually wrap it up...

Having finished YJ, I'm now watching Interview with the Vampire with one friend (new to both of us) and Shetland with the other (a rewatch for me, but it's been a while). IwtV is slow-moving and sometimes I wonder why I'm interested, but I am, and now that previously unadmitted mysteries seem to be being hinted at I am more intrigued... (No spoilers, please! I read the original novel in like 1982, and saw the original movie when it came out, but remember basically nothing of either of them [except that I remembered for decades the stupid way in which movie-Claudia's hair curled when she was turned].) And I love Shetland and the way that (after a shaky bit at the end of the Perez stories) it refocused to center on my girl Tosh and our new DI Ruth Calder. I mean, it basically did what I wistfully hoped the fourth season of Ted Lasso would do: waved goodbye to the dudes and settled in to tell a story centering women. I absolutely adore Tosh.

I'm doing a bunch of traveling this summer, which used to be par for the course but is excitingly new since the pandemic! I had that brief trip to Virginia in May, and then my inlaws had two (TWO) family reunions in Quebec, and now I'm leaving on Friday for almost three weeks in the States, visiting friends, some of whom I haven't seen in years. I'm excited! And then (after my stepmother visits here for four days) Geoff and I are going on our first big trip since the Before Times, spending two weeks in Wales! I'm even more excited about that, and also somewhat intimidated; I'm out of practice at managing logistics for this kind of thing, plus the first week is going to involve some rather challenging hiking. And of course I am still afraid of COVID. But we're both over sixty, we won't be able to travel like this forever even in the best-case scenario, and COVID isn't going away, so we want to do this travel while we can. We're still going to take as many precautions as we reasonably can.

And I'm not reading much that's meaty, but last night I remembered that I was halfway through World War Z and picked it up again, which was a mistake at ten pm; I read for a while, freaked myself out, and had to do crossword puzzles for a while before trying to go to sleep, so today I am le tired.

vaguely political stuffI mentioned to a Canadian friend the the day that I was about to go to the States, and she got that look you get when someone tells you someone has died and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry." I keep thinking I can't reel any more and then there's more. The volunteer work I was doing so much of last year for the Movement Voter Project is slowly beginning to start up again; two different people in the group have independently asked me to develop a training program to teach other people to do the kind of Zoom tech support that I do for them. (I'm not the only person who does that work, but they tell me I'm the best 😊) I don't have time to do that right now -- look at all my travel! -- but I brain-dumped a whole bunch of tips and advice for the first person, who has written them up and will incorporate them into a training she'll do, and told the second person to connect with the first. And the work itself will really start up again in the fall, when I'll be back and ready to take it on.

a collection of book reviews

Jul. 23rd, 2025 05:09 pm
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
[personal profile] philomytha
I write up books when I read them and forget to post the actual review, so here's a collection of books I've read sometime in the past six months.

The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran
As recommended by [personal profile] black_bentley, a constant pusher of fantastic books, thank you! This is all about fear and courage in warfare and their relationship with shell-shock and other psychological traumas of war. The author was a trench doctor in WW1 and then later became Churchill's personal physician, though this book is almost entirely about his WW1 experiences, written in 1942. It was a really fantastic read.

Sometimes the biases of the era come through: Moran occasionally comes out with stuff about how 'good racial stock' is required for avoiding shell shock and cowardice, but it always feels like those are platitudes he's occasionally diverted by before getting into the practical, vivid and very sensible things he has to say about the causes of mental breakdown, based on his WW1 observations. He has a lot to say about the differences between a professional standing army and a citizen army of conscripts, about how men in a citizen army react to danger, how good morale and esprit du corps are protective against mental trauma, how fear operates and how to combat it, what courage looks like, what kind of leadership soldiers respond to and its impact on the mental wellbeing of the soldiers - he doesn't use modern jargon for any of this, but that's what a modern reader would take from it. He talks a bit about the different branches of the service and how the air force and navy and submarine service have different impacts on mental health both because of the different demands of the service - the group isolation of a ship vs the largely solo isolation of a fighter pilot - and because of the different traditions and beliefs these services held about themselves, and compares that to experience of the infantryman in the trenches.

In an odd way I found it a very relatable and reassuring book. It made me realise that I'm pretty confident I have the type of courage Moran talks about, to hold firm when horrifying things are happening because others are depending on you holding firm, and confident not in a sort of wishful-thinking I'm-sure-I-could-do-that way, but the same way I'm confident I can spell miscellaneous: I've done it, or something as like to it as a middle-aged woman in peacetime can get, lots of times before. I recogised a lot of the emotional dynamics he describes, the way you recover after a sudden shock of violence, the temporary unravelling and how your mind and body heal up again, and I also recognised the factors that protect, or in their absence damage, your ability to hold firm, both practical - food, sleep, rest breaks, humour, health - and moral - the belief in what you are doing and why, social support from others doing the same thing, the conviction that failure is not an option. A really good, insightful book.


Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans, Daniel Cowling
Apologies if the title causes you to get a song stuck in your head for the next week, I already had the song stuck in my head and then tripped over the book. This is a decent general overview of the British occupation of Germany 1945-9; Cowling doesn't go into anything in tremendous detail but gives a little bit of lots of things. I've read books that take a much deeper dive into certain aspects - the Berlin Airlift, the T-Force memoir and also the bonkers sigint book, plus a general book on the postwar atrocities across Europe - and so some of this was a bit top-down overview compared to that. The chapter on 'fratting', for instance, was interesting read against the memoir with its candid details about German women selling sex for food, and the relationship with the former owners when living in requisitioned property. Though, given the memoir's emphasis on partying and having fun and hiring one's friends, that certainly backed up Cowling's chapter on the ineptitude and bad behaviour of the military and civilian government. Cowling's argument comes across a bit incoherent at times - there's an awful lot of 'wow the occupiers were awful and incompetent and made a total mess' followed by a chapter on the rapid recovery, economic growth and stable democratic government in West Germany afterwards, so you're left wondering just how Cowling thinks these two accounts fit together.

There was quite a lot about the economics of the occupation, I did love the chapter on the black market and some of the unforeseen consequences. The 'money for old smokes' scandal was ridiculous: British soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany got a free ration of cigarettes, fifty a week. Cigarettes were the de facto currency of German civilians, the mark being essentially worthless in 1945-6, and so you could trade your cigarettes with German civilians for anything from accordions to dental care (though sex was usually paid for in chocolate or other food). And one thing you could trade them for was German marks, lots of them. But there was one place where German marks were used at their official exchange rate, and that was NAAFI shops. So you could take your free cigarettes, sell them for an awful lot of German marks, then take the German marks and exchange them in the NAAFI shops for whatever you wanted. Which included postal orders and savings bonds in sterling, which you could deposit in your nice British bank account. If you saved up your free cigarettes for a few months, with 500 cigarettes you could easily get £100, which was a tidy sum. And it seems that practically everyone stationed in Germany realised this at once, because this particular type of transaction led to a £50 million hole in the occupation's budget. Which is an argument for the incompetence of the British administration, certainly.

And as for the title, Cowling doesn't ever really engage with the question: were we beastly to the Germans, and should we have been. It's interesting to compare this book to Keith Lowe's Savage Continent, which is a much broader book in scope and yet also vastly more detailed and incisive: Lowe really engages with the question of human suffering on all levels and the historian's ethics, he talks about the lack of acknowledgement of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war attempts to prosecute war crimes and care for refugees, about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe and how the very real suffering this caused is used by historians of particular political bents who want to argue that the Germans were the real victims of WW2 and setting it in the context of what else was happening and to who... by contrast Cowling never really gets into the difficult questions. He quotes an awful lot of British newspapers and their opinions of how generous or harsh we should be to German civilians postwar - in many ways this is a British newspaper account of the occupation: how it was perceived at home in the context of what was happening politically in the UK, and that's about the level on which Cowling engages with the question. He gives brief snapshots of varying attitudes - a display in London of daily rations for German civilians which was designed to show how much worse off they were in 1946 than British civilians (whose food was rationed even more severely than in wartime) ended up with a lot of people thinking the Germans were still getting much too generous an allocation. On the other hand Cowling also includes stories of British soldiers routinely handing over their rations to famished German children. But he never really engages with it beyond this superficial skim of attitudes, and he also avoids exploring the German perspectives and what they thought about it. So, a good general overview of the occupation and introduction to it all, but go elsewhere for insight and detailed analysis.


Paid To Be Safe, Margaret Morrison & Pamela Tulk-Hart
The final of my IWM wartime novels, written together by two ATA ferry pilots about a fictional ATA ferry pilot. So not quite a memoir, but strongly based on real experiences and set at real airfields. I really enjoyed this, it's deftly written, captures the essense of the experience beautifully and is full of fascinating detail. And also death: this is a book in which a lot of the characters die, because it's wartime and that's what happens in wartime and I don't doubt that the main character's experience of multiple bereavements is both realistic and realistically written.

Our heroine is Susan Sandyman, who managed to escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive and has just arrived back in England, with husband and infant child both dead and desperately in need of something to think about that isn't that. And she learned to fly back when she lived in Malaya, and so she joins the ATA to become a ferry pilot, and we follow her adventures until the end of the war. There's a tremendous amount of fantastic detail about the training process, vivid descriptions of life in the training schools, the different people Susan meets and what the training is like, and all the things she learns about all the different aircraft and the process of learning how to cope with a job where you might fly five different types of aircraft in one day, compared to the normal RAF training where you might only ever fly one or two. There were some fantastic stories that must have been drawn from life like how a caterpillar in a pitot tube can very nearly make you crash.

The title, Paid To Be Safe, is what was drummed into the ferry pilots: their job is not to take any risks, their job is to transport the valuable and much-needed aircraft safely from A to B, their job is to keep themselves and their aircraft safe at all times and to know how to never get into dangerous situations in the first place. Despite this it is still a dangerous job, and ferry pilots die in training and in service - as I said, this is a book where sudden death can happen to anyone at any point, whether it's disease or bombs or airplane crashes, a very wartime book with this constant thread of trauma running underneath everything else.


The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
This was a really good Terror forced proximity AU readerfic that had an incoherent plot sellotaped to it. Loved the time travellers getting to know each other and the modern world, and their characters were drawn fairly well, but all the other characters were pretty bland, and the main character and narrator in particular was very much a generic-tumblr narrative voice. There was plenty of drama and excitement and events, I whizzed through the book waiting for the moment when it would all make sense, but it never did, the plot was just tacked on to try to explain to the non-fandom world why the author was writing Graham Gore/modern reader self insert. But despite that I'd have read another 100k of Time Travellers Have Adventures With Bikes And Spotify, especially if it had involved more about one of the secondary time travel characters, Captain Arthur Reginald Smyth, retrieved from the Somme about five minutes before his death and by far my favourite of the characters for highly predictable reasons. A fun but frustrating book.

in which we probe my outer limits

Jul. 23rd, 2025 10:50 am
fox: my left eye.  "ceci n'est pas une fox." (Default)
[personal profile] fox
  1. Nobody, boss included, wants this, but it's not impossible I will be laid off in a month's time.

  2. My mother's mental acuity is slipping; my brother thinks he may think it's worse than I think it is because I see her every week and he, although he talks to her every day, only sees her in person every few months. Likewise the director of her assisted living facility has just returned from a short vacation and called my brother yesterday to say if they were seeing her for the first time now, they'd think memory care rather than assisted living was probably the best place for her. Put another way, the call scheduled for the three of us tomorrow afternoon is definitely going to be about how it's time to plan to move her over to memory care when a place in that wing opens up. She's not going to like that, of course, but I was surprised by how strongly I didn't like it—the wave of NO that I felt in my whole body, a physical wash of Kubler Ross denial. It was something. Rationally I know it's happening and I know keeping her safe and getting her the best care is going to involve changes and adaptations and so on, but wow, the fact that the ego and superego know that didn't stop the id going MOMMY!

  3. On the up side, one of my favorite co-workers came in to talk about a work thing yesterday, in the course of which conversation I mentioned #1☝️, and at the very suggestion that the big boss might let me go, favorite co-worker said "Jeeesus Christ, he's lost his mind." That doesn't affect whether or not I'll keep my job, but it is good for the ego.

  4. My brother's mother-in-law is also not well, so my sister-in-law is going out this weekend to help her (because her sister, who lives near their mom, happens to be away this weekend), meaning my brother is going to have to bail on a family wedding; he and I were both already going to leave our families behind, as the bride is our cousin's daughter and our spouses nor kids don't really know almost anyone up there, so now it looks like I'll be the sole representative of my mom's node of the family tree. (The bride's-grandmother's-sister node is often not well represented, I'm sure.) My nephew is almost 15 and would be perfectly safe in the house by himself for a couple of days, but he wouldn't be comfortable with it, and of course it's right for his father not to know that and ditch him anyway. I said "You could bring him with you?"—but a last-minute plane ticket and an extra guest the caterer hadn't known about, nah; I said "You could ship him to my house?" (because the prince would love, love having an unexpected visit from his cousin, oh my gosh)—but even as I said it I went on to say that wouldn't really be fair to spring on Himself, outside of a true emergency—I could totally say "Listen, Nephew is coming to stay with us next weekend," and Himself wouldn't say "Why wasn't I consulted about this?", he'd say "Oh my God, what's happened?!" In short: My brother is staying home with his kid this weekend, which is the right decision but a bummer all around. (The much, much bigger bummer being that my sister-in-law's mother is doing as poorly as she is.)

  5. The other bit of up side from yesterday is that when I got home from work and told Himself that my sister-in-law has to go be with her mom so my brother can't go to the wedding because nephew, etc., almost the first words out of his mouth were "He could come stay here?" ❤️❤️❤️ He went on to have a whole text-message conversation about that with my brother while I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and the end result was the same (my brother is staying home with his kid this weekend), but the fact that Himself went directly to "I can take him" without even the merest hint of a suggestion from me made me so happy. SO happy.

  6. Only then I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and on the way home I started feeling a sort of light-headed vertigo feeling that does happen to me sometimes—most recently on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday—but usually just for a split second, which I don't like, especially when I'm driving, but it really is normally less than the time it takes to blink twice and I don't think an awful lot more about it. Yeah but: Yesterday it came on partway home and didn't go away. I was able to see clearly and concentrate on the road, and my reaction time was fine with respect to signaling, steering, braking, all the things you need to do to drive safely, but it was absolutely terrifying and the minute we got home I told Himself about it and insisted that he do the driving this afternoon (and maybe all the driving until I know what the fuck is happening to my head?!). He suggested maybe my blood sugar was low and asked me to eat about a teaspoon of sugar straight, which in his experience is like a shot of adrenaline, so I did, and nothing happened. I ate a little dinner, though I didn't have much appetite, and that didn't help. I drank some water and that didn't change anything either. Took my blood pressure: 128/86. No fever. I emailed my doctor to tell her this whole tale and conclude with "?!!!?!??!?", and Himself said if I wasn't planning to take an Ativan at bedtime he really thought I should.

  7. [gestures at the world in general and at our federal government in particular]

  8. Someone in one of my Discords mentioned that in a recent protracted panic attack of theirs, one of their main symptoms had been vertigo, which reinforced Himself's Ativan suggestion. I told my usual Tuesday evening dS-watching Discord that I was going to bail and go to bed early, and they offered to punt this week's episode to next week, and I said no need to do that because of me (the responsibility of everyone else's plans changing because my stress levels are making me crazy was also kind of stressful), and they said hey look, everyone who isn't Fox is fine with shifting to next week, decision made, off you go, feel better—and that made me cry a little, people being nice to me, which just goes to show that taking Ativan and going to bed early was the right decision.

  9. Reader, I took the Ativan. I made up a little song to the tune of "Sodomy" from Hair, and then I slept soundly for the whole night. And this morning I feel—well, none of the stressy things have changed, but I feel like I slept well and I know I'm going to be making dinner this evening instead of driving on the freeway with my son in the middle of a dizzy spell, so that's a little better.

  10. Here's my song:

    Ativan,
    Lexapro,
    Gabapentin,
    Buproprion,
    Doctor - what pills am I even on?
    Medication
    Can be fun!
    Join the Holy Order Pharma Sutra,
    Everyone!


    You're welcome.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Jul. 23rd, 2025 08:35 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Valenti Angelo’s Nino, a 1930s Newbery book of one of my favorite genres, “a thinly fictionalized memoir of the author’s childhood in Ye Olden Times.” Angelo emigrated to the United States at the age of eight, but he remembered his early years in Italy in great detail, especially the delicious food, like polenta with cheese and honey.

I’ve been looking for a Louisa May Alcott book to read for my postcard project, and rather stymied because I’ve read all the main ones at this point, but Tasha Tudor came to the rescue: she illustrated A Round Dozen, twelve short stories by Louisa May Alcott collected by Anne Thaxter Eaton. Alcott’s moralistic tendencies grow somewhat more concentrated in short story form, and although I have generally a high tolerance for that sort of thing, by the last story I wanted to eat an entire indigestible mincemeat pie while sitting in a hayloft reading something unwholesome.

And I read Dorothy Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker, a recent Little Free Library find! Our heroine Amelia Jones, unwilling to follow her therapist’s recommendation that she find some purpose in life by taking a typing class, instead acquires a secondhand shop. While tidying up her new wares, she discovers a note inside the hurdy-gurdy, which purports to be from a woman who is about to be murdered…

If you like Gilman, you’ll like this. An excellent mystery story that grows increasingly tense, with a couple of twists that delighted me.

What I’m Reading Now

In Lord Peter, I just read a short story that appears to be Sayers’ first go-round for the mystery plot of Have His Carcase, followed by a short story where Lord Peter fakes his own death and goes undercover for two years in order to round up an evil secret society of criminals.

This is particularly funny because in the story immediately preceding, Lord Peter announces that he always loses interest in detective stories featuring evil secret societies of criminals. So do I, Lord Peter! And yet here we are!

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a mere THREE Newbery books left! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild: Her Book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, and Dorothy Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus. Full speed ahead to the end!
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Recent DNFs (Did Not Finish)

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman



A horror novel about - I think - how a Q-Anon analogue turns people into literal zombies. I couldn't get into this book. I don't think it was bad, it just wasn't my thing. I didn't vibe with the prose style at all.

The Baby Dragon Cafe, by A. T. Qureshi



A woman opens a cafe that's also a baby dragon rescue. I adored the idea of this book, not to mention the extremely charming cover, but the execution left a lot to be desired. It was just plain dull. I dragged myself through two chapters, both of which felt eternal, then gave up. Too bad! I really wanted to like it, because the idea is delightful.

In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, by Richard Waitt



This ought to have been exactly my jam, except for the author's absolutely bizarre prose style, which is a combination of Pittman shorthand and Chuck Tingle's Twitter minus the sense of humor, with an allergy to articles and very strange syntax. I literally had no idea what some of his sentences meant. This weirdness extends to direct quotes from multiple people, making me suspect how direct they are. And yes, this was traditionally published.

Here are some quotes, none of which make more sense in context:

It contrasts the chance jungle violence with lava flows off Kilauea - so Hollywood but predictable.

"The state's closure seems yours. Have I missed something?"

[And here's a bunch of Tinglers.]

Heart attack took Eddie in 1975.

These years since wife Eddie died Truman's fire has cooled.

Since wife Eddie died, Rob is the closest he has to a friend.

Since wife Eddie died, Truman has been a bleak recluse, the winters especially lonely.

Book Review: The Whispering Mountain

Jul. 22nd, 2025 10:19 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] littlerhymes and I polished off our romp through Joan Aiken’s Wolves sequence with The Whispering Mountain, a side story to the main series focusing on Owen Hughes, son of the captain of the ship which takes Dido home to England (with incidental stops along the way to restore a reincarnated Arthur to his throne, etc.).

When The Whispering Mountain takes place, Captain Hughes is still lost at sea dealing with the etc. Meanwhile, his son Owen is living unhappily with his grandfather, who manages a museum in a small village in Wales. Said museum has just come into possession of the legendary golden Harp of Teirtu, which is coveted by the local lord Malyn, a wicked man who owns a vast collection of golden objects.

When Owen’s grandfather refuses to hand over the harp, Malyn sends a couple of thieves to steal it. They not only steal the harp, but kidnap Owen, and frame him for the theft in the process.

And we’re off! We gallop through a typical Aikenian melange of fierce wild animals (boars, wolves, a couple of tiger snakes), also a fiercely loyal pet falcon named Hawc who likes to ride around on the head of his owner Arabis, Arabis’s poet-father who is too absorbed in writing an epic poem of King Arthur to quite notice the Plot swirling all around him, and of course Prince Davie.

“We’re finally meeting Prince Davie!” I crowed, because we never did manage to catch up with him in Is Underground before his tragic death. But no, this is a different Prince Davie: Davie Jamie Charlie Needie Geordie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart, known in The Cuckoo Tree as King Dick, the father of the Prince Davie of Is Underground, who will remain forever a golden shadow.

We also meet a bunch of small furry people who live under the Whispering Mountain, who I believe are drawn from the same substrate as Sutcliff’s Little Dark People: the theory that Britain’s fairies are in fact memories of an older race that was driven underground by successive waves of invasion.

Except Aiken being Aiken, she takes this in a wildly new direction: the little dark people are not the original Britons at all, but were in fact kidnapped by the Romans from their original homeland for their gold-working skills. After the Romans left Britain, the goldworkers hid under the mountains for two thousand years, becoming small and furry as a result of environmental pressures, making beautiful golden objects (including, for instance, harps), and longing for their warm sunny homeland.

Do they make it back to their warm sunny homeland? Of course they’re on their way by the end of the book. This is Aiken! The good are rewarded, the bad are punished, and sometimes one of the good ones dies too just to add a bit of spice to the proceedings.

And here, for now, we come to the end of the Aikens. She wrote many, many more, and we may swing back around someday to read some of them, but right now we are on to our next adventure: a reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

Picture Book Monday: A Time to Keep

Jul. 21st, 2025 12:06 pm
osprey_archer: (yuletide)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I had the vague idea that A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays was a book of holiday celebration suggestions, and I suppose you could use it that way, but what it is really is a picture book of memories of Tasha Tudor’s holidays with her children. (Like the earlier Kate Greenaway, Tudor cheerfully clothes her children in the garb of an earlier and more picturesque era.)

She recalls dancing round the bonfire for the New Year; sugaring off in March; an Easter egg tree the decorated eggs of “goose, duck, chicken, bantam, and pigeon,” with tiny canary eggs at the very tip top. (What I would give for a sight of this tree in real life!) May baskets and Maypoles in May, watching the fireworks in the nearby village from the top of the hill on the Fourth, and her daughter’s birthday in August, with a stunning two-page spread showing the cake all glowing with candles as it floats down the stream.

Even if I had a stream, I don’t believe I would ever come up with the idea of floating a cake down it, or have the guts to do it. What if the cake capsized! But this is the difference between me and Tasha Tudor: Tudor doesn’t imagine what could go wrong, but how ethereally beautiful it would be if the cake floats down the stream all right.

A Halloween party for Halloween, with bobbing for apples and “pumpkin moonshines,” as Tudor calls jack-o-lanterns; and then Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, starting with the Advent Calendar and St. Nicholas Day (with St. Nicholas cake, whose existence I have hitherto not suspected), and a walk through the woods on Christmas eve to see the Christ child in a full size creche. And then back to the house for the Christmas tree, all glimmering with candles…

All of this is quite a lot of work, of course. A full size creche does not construct itself, and a Christmas tree with candles has to be fresh cut from the woods and watched like a hawk. But so much of the joy of holidays is in the work, if you feel the work not as a task that needs to be disposed of but a part of the celebration.

Summer of Horror and other fun things

Jul. 20th, 2025 10:13 pm
sholio: airplane flying away from a tan colored castle (Biggles-castle airplane)
[personal profile] sholio
[personal profile] summerofhorrorexchange revealed today! I got an astonishing 15K(!!!) Biggles fic (!!!) which I won't be able to properly start reading until tomorrow, but I cannot WAIT, it looks amazing and I'm dying to read it!

Obligatory reminder that I have a fic in the exchange as well. Deeply mysterious, hid my tracks amazingly as usual. And there is a lovely selection of other horror fic as well!

Earlier today, before all of that, I posted yet another Murderbot TV-verse fic, System // Handshake (2500 wds, gen, post-canon). Summary is spoilery for the finale; it's loosely springboarded off another fic I'd read earlier.

There's also this seriously adorable short interview with the whole Murderbot cast (link goes to Tumblr) in which they talk about playing the Bitter/Sweet game from the show on the set. HOW ARE THEY SO CUTE, I DIEEEEEE

And, longer and more serious, but I really enjoyed watching this David Dastmalchian interview; he talks about the show, as well as some of his other projects (Dune; comic book writing) and is so adorably excited about the show and invested in it.
petra: Superman looking downward with a pensive expression (Clark - Beautiful night)
[personal profile] petra
The sidekick with no fear (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DCU (Comics), Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent & James "Jimmy" Olsen
Characters: James "Jimmy" Olsen, Clark Kent
Additional Tags: Drabble, Crack
Summary:

Jimmy's not from around here either.

*

Inspired by this Tumblr post.
bethbethbeth: An excerpt from a Marc Chagall painting (Art Chagall Winter (bbb))
[personal profile] bethbethbeth
On May 8th, I offered to read the first five books people recced - assuming they were available (preferably from the library) - and I'd give a short review [https://bethbethbeth.dreamwidth.org/701769.html].

This is the eighth recced book review.

The Book of Koli (2020), by M.R. Carey (recced by china_shop on dreamwidth)

I'm certain I can't count the number of post-apocalyptic dystopian novels I've read in my life, but apparently there are still new & engaging ways of approaching that genre.

Here's what I'll tell you: the protagonist is a young guy, growing up in an isolated village, and...no, you know what? I'm not going to share any of the specifics. I'm glad I wasn't spoiled at all before starting to read, and I think I'm going to share the spoiler-free experience with you.

Somehow, I'd never heard of this book or its author, so I didn't know there were sequels. I literally just finished book 1 a half hour ago, but I'm already looking forward to book 2.

Note: If you want trigger warnings, feel free to message me with questions.
petra: A man in a fedora with text: Between the dames and the horses, sometimes I don't even know why I put my hat on. (Cabin Pressure - Dames and horses)
[personal profile] petra
Stephen Colbert is the only thing I have watched on CBS for a very, very long time, and even him, via clips.

Except for the time we were in NYC and went to a taping, which was good fun.

Paramount: How dare this man we hired to speak truth to power speak our truth to our power!

Trump: BWAH HA HA HA

Fans who grew up on the Colbert Report and are growing inured to canceled shows: ...okay, so who's going to hire the most popular guy in late night TV now?

I find it upsetting that one of the loudest voices pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is losing his position, not because Colbert is flawless but because what the fuck, censoring satire much? Being able to laugh at the assholes in charge is a survival mechanism.

Self-soothing with John Finnemore.

I don't like the modern internet

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:08 am
petra: A blonde woman with both hands over her face (Britta - Twohanded facepalm)
[personal profile] petra
No shit, there I was, updating my LinkedIn profile -- you know, the one under my wallet name -- for the first time in (mumbledy), for professional reasons that do not involve looking for a job.

LinkedIn: You want to connect with [personal profile] marcelo and [personal profile] mary!

Me: ... I really, deeply wish you did not know that. Also, and this is important, neither of those people lives on my continent, and I have never so much as spoken on the phone with them. How do you know I know them, since I met them via writing porn about DC Comics characters 20 years ago? How can I make you un-know it? What arcane nonsense lurks in the data-mining?

Don't worry -- if I only know you through fandom, I ain't connecting via Linkedfreakin'In unless you give me the okay, because WHAT.

Book Review: The Clansman

Jul. 18th, 2025 07:58 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
As I have mentioned previously, I’ve been going through the books I selected from my grandmother’s bookshelves after she died. At the back of these bookshelves, among the hodgepodge of books Grandma inherited from her aunts and uncles (including early editions of Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea, and you’d better believe I snapped those up), I found a copy of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman.

At the time, I was still studying history in grad school, focusing on American history around 1900, and this just happens to be one of the most influential books in the time period - perhaps in all of American history. It was a historical romance (in both the old and new senses) which caught the attention of filmmaker D. W. Griffith, who adapted it into the 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation, which led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

So of course I took the book, but what with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to reading it till now. In the intervening period I’ve read a lot of other books from the time period, which helps put it better in context.

In particular, it helps put into context just how racist Dixon was. He’s not merely reflecting the prevailing attitudes of his era (as most writers do, whether they want to or not) but actively arguing that the prevailing attitudes of one of the most racist eras in American history aren’t racist enough.

It would therefore be pleasant to report that Dixon is also a terrible writer, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky who wrote What Is To Be Done?, another book that inspired deadly political cosplay on a vast scale. (Although it occurs to me that I haven’t actually read Chernyshevsky, and in fact may have received this opinion from people who only read it in translation.) But stylistically Dixon is pretty similar to other popular historical romances of the time period. His tale is slower-paced than an adventure story would be nowadays, but in its own literary context it zips along. You can see why a film director would find it attractive. Plenty of incident, and two love stories for the price of one!

This is especially true since Dixon, a devil quoting scripture, presents his story as a variation of that old American favorite, indeed that foundational American myth, that blockbuster gold of plucky underdogs rebelling against tyranny. American colonists against the British, William Tell against the Austrians, Rebel Alliance against the Empire; or (Dixon’s favorite analogy) Scottish Covenanters worshipping in the hills rather than bow to the despotic English demand that they accept the established church.

Dixon’s Southerners are descendants of those Covenanters, fueled by that self-same love of freedom. Like their forebears, they refuse to bow down to the demands of the despotic conquering power, but form a heroic resistance (the Ku Klux Klan by way of les Amis de l’ABC) to the horrors of racial equality visited upon the South by the cruelty of a vengeful United States Congress.

In particular, this policy of racial equality is driven by Senator Stoneman, Dixon’s Thaddeus Stevens expy. In Stoneman, Dixon achieves a surprisingly complex character: a man kindly, even generous, in his personal life, but so politically so driven by his ideals that he will adopt any policy that seems to further those ideals, no matter how terrible the results on the ground.

This is interesting. You’ve got shades here of the French Revolution, idealistic leaders driven by lovely visions of freedom and equality which somehow end in rivers of blood from the guillotine. I was genuinely surprised that Dixon managed to achieve such a multifaceted view of his arch-enemy.

Except it turns out that Stoneman’s apparent complexity is completely accidental: in the last few pages, it’s revealed that Stoneman never cared about racial equality at all! After a Southern raid during the Civil War destroyed Stoneman’s Pennsylvania factories, he was consumed by the bitter desire for vengeance, and racial equality was his weapon of choice against the prostrate Southern people.

This is a very interesting book on what you might call an anthropological level, as a document of a certain kind of southern viewpoint around 1900. It’s also interesting as a piece of historiography, as Dixon has to thread a very fine needle to argue that the South did no wrong in seceding, but having lost is now VERY loyal and has learned to love the noble Abraham Lincoln who by the way DEFINITELY would have been nicer to the South than Congress was, but as Congress WAS mean the South HAD to break the laws, and this definitely doesn’t undermine the fact that the South is now very, very loyal. Very!

And you could undoubtedly write an excellent paper about The Clansman as a (mis)use of classic tropes of resistance to tyranny. For goodness sake, Dixon even throws in a Sydney Carton scene. It’s a fantastic example of how you can keep the outward form of a kind of story intact while completely reversing the meaning.

But for obvious reasons I cannot recommend it as light and agreeable reading.

Temperature Flash fic reveals

Jul. 17th, 2025 10:44 pm
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
Terrible Temperature Flash authors were revealed this evening, and I wrote two not at all predictable fics:

A Touch of Warmth (Biggles books, Biggles/EvS, 1000 words)
This was entirely for the mental image of Erich wrapping his coat around a chilled Biggles. ♥

Taking the Heat (Babylon 5, Vir & Londo gen, 2500 wds)
Londo gets heatstroke on Centauri Prime. This was a treat for the h/c of it all.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.

Nonfiction

Jul. 17th, 2025 02:38 pm
rivkat: Dean reading (dean reading)
[personal profile] rivkat
James C. Scott, ExpandJames Scott, resisting dominance )

Agustin Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary: Expandnot as detailed as I wanted )

Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History: ExpandMalthus and corn (and corn laws) )

Jane Marie, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans: ExpandThe bad kind of MLM )
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Expandin praise of excess )

Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion: Expanda big day and its commemoration )

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: Expandshockingly, it's complicated )

Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think: Expandthey try things )

Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, & Matt Hills: Expandlive theater as a fandom source )

Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves: Expandhe's not wrong or exempt )

Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010: Expandforesight that didn't help )

KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing: Expandfunctionality is all )

fox: my left eye.  "ceci n'est pas une fox." (Default)
[personal profile] fox

So in the fun time that is my life, remember how this new job fell in my lap around Christmas time and I moved over to it on February 11? And then also remember how a lot of unelected teenagers and crypto bros and so forth did a hatchet job on the entire federal government in the spring? Yeah so my new workplace lost millions of dollars in grants, and three people in areas other than mine have been laid off, and yesterday the big boss sat down with me and said he's just not sure they're going to keep having enough work for me to do, and another month from now when my probationary period is over he might not be able to keep me. This is a heads up, not a genuine notice, because it's conceivable they might find a way for it to work out - for one thing, I'm the only one who does what I do and they don't want to go back to having nobody do it. I proposed a couple of solutions, one being to bill most or all of my work to overhead rather than making people put me in as a line item in their project budgets as they're doing now, because the latter has them (a) putting me down for as little work as they can as they're suuuper carefully husbanding their resources and (b) not giving me work until the very end of their process, so I'm sitting around waiting a lot of the time, whereas if I were overhead I could work with people collaboratively and iteratively and not burn up their budgets, so I'd be busier and the products I work on would be better. (Seems like a slam dunk to me, but the overhead money has to come from somewhere, I guess, so maybe that's not as much of a solution as I think.) Another is to bust me back to 60%, which would free up two days a week and still pay more than I was making at my old job.

My old job, by the way, was not allowed to backfill my position - they made someone an offer, which she accepted, and then they had to pull it, and also cut a part-timer and one of two people in the other role they had two of, so they're down to bare bones and no matter what happens to or with this job I can't go back.

So that bites! I had a little cry about it and then activated the bat-signal (emailed my former grandboss and other references), updated my resume, googled some shit, and today I have applied for one (1) job. It's easier to get into a lifeboat from the deck of the ship than from the sea. Maybe I'll aim to apply for one job a week as long as I still have this one and bump it up if it gets where I need to. Also updated my LinkedIn, which I haven't actually even looked at in many many years, but I guess people are still using it?

UGH.

Book Review: Queer Person

Jul. 17th, 2025 10:21 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
The Newbery project continues with Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person, which begins with a child of about four wandering into a Pikuni camp in the middle of a blizzard. He wanders from tepee to tepee, taken in and then turned away as the inhabitants decide he’s an idiot, until at last he reaches the last tepee in the village, where the irascible old woman recognizes that he’s deaf and dumb and takes him in.

He grows up an outcast, called Queer Person and considered a fool by most of the people in the village, although Granny and a few friends learn to talk to him with their hands (using, I think, an expanded version of the Plains sign language) and recognize his talent for building things. In his teens, a bout of heatstroke causes a couple of hard worm-shaped objects to fall out of his ears, enabling him once again to hear. Granny explains that sometimes fevers plug the ears like this. She suggests that he should hide his new abilities until he’s mastered spoken language.

Meanwhile! We veer into Problem of Tomboys territory! The boys of the camp are riding a yearling buffalo, which came into camp as a pet but has now grown too big for comfort. One of the boys dares the girls that none of them will dare to ride it, at which point the chief’s daughter Singing Moon rides the buffalo across the plains, jumping off just in time before it rejoins the buffalo herd.

Impressed by her bravery, Granny and an older warrior suggest that Singing Moon join the next warrior raid - in disguise, of course, at least at first. After all, Granny did it herself in her youth, and her presence rallied the warriors to great feats of bravery! And so does Singing Moon’s, but the greatest feat of all is her own success in counting coup on an enemy, knocking him off his horse and taking the horse for a trophy.

Singing Moon is of course the love interest, and the next bit of the book involves Queer Person proving that he can match her in bravery - not through the traditional route of going into battle, but by saving Singing Moon’s kidnapped little brother. Queer Person sneaks into the camp of a rival tribe, where he’s captured, but they’re so impressed by his bravery in coming into their camp unarmed that they decide to subject him to tests rather than kill him outright, ending in a test where he has to battle an old warrior who has decided that he’d like to go out gloriously in single combat with this brave outsider.

The old warrior is, of course! Queer Person’s father.

Then Queer Person heads home, returns the kidnapped child to his family, reveals he can talk, sleeps for three days, and then marries Singing Moon.

Ralph Hubbard (also known as “Doc” Hubbard) was a professor who promoted Native American culture, and he clearly put a ton of research into the background of this story. (He also later had an asteroid named after him. And he was the son of Elbert Hubbard, who wrote “A Message to Garcia,” founded an Arts and Crafts community called the Roycroft Shops, and died in the sinking of the Lusitania.)

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Jul. 16th, 2025 03:52 pm
sage: A comic book drawing of a Black British man driving (Rivers of London)
[personal profile] sage
Expandbooks (Aaronovitch, Greene & Sasportas, Erlewine, Billock, Wells, McCord, Kaufman, Odyssey, Oken, Hamaker-Zondag) )

healthcrap
Yay, I'm not anemic anymore, though I've still got another 3 months of iron supps ahead of me. I had a psych appt today to confirm my meds are still doing their thing. Boo, I'm temporarily off the rhodiola rosea and back on Adderall for the next month (because rhodiola hasn't been safety tested for long-term use). Expandcut for mention of weight loss )

yay!
As has been posted everywhere, Murderbot is getting a Season 2! That means ART! \o/ I haven't yet caught up with the last few eps of S1, but I'll get there in due time. (Viewing, such a challenge when I'm on a reading kick. And when I'm NOT on a reading kick. Sigh.)

Expandrl )

yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday and had a really nice time. Great turnout, and it's good for me to see human beings in person. Pain in the shoulder, though. I want my crochet arm back! But I met a few new people, including one young woman who also has Ehlers-Danlos. So cool to commiserate in person.

natural disaster: Texas floods
My parents were finally able to leave their ridgetop and run errands, though all the intact bridges are missing guardrails (at minimum). One of them was completely surrounded with gear and detritus from the kids camp upriver. So heartbreaking. Thankfully, their POA jumped right on finding engineers and requesting bids for repairing their main bridge & its banks, and the low water crossing is sound, now that it's clear of downed trees. I am still so sad about the catastrophe, even though I'm not directly affected. Camps were a safe space for me when I was a kid, and though they were in a different part of the state, it's all too easy to imagine the worst happening.

kitty
[youtube.com profile] KittenAcademy has moved to Pennsylvania and is searching for a new rescue/shelter to work with in the Bethlehem/Allentown general vicinity. If you know of one that is willing to provide pregnant momcats and manage adoption apps, please let me know so I can pass it along to them. ION, the family of black cats and kittens who had been living part time in my backyard are no longer around. I hope they got scooped up by a shelter and/or TNR'd somewhere safe.

#resist
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On protests/marches tomorrow. If you participate, please think of me & everyone else who would like to march but can't.

Note: Mercury stations retrograde tomorrow, July 17, at 15*34' Leo (and stays retrograde until August 11 at 4*14' Leo). I'm curious what that will mean for the protests. At least they're on a Thursday, so maybe that will help keep people safe amid the likely miscommunications.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

Wednesday Reading Meme

Jul. 16th, 2025 10:57 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I continue to progress in my quest to read the books I took from my grandmother’s house after she died. This time, Lucy M. Thruston’s A Girl of Virginia, which I took because I had started reading it and wanted to finish it (although clearly not enough to get to it any time in the last decade…), in part because it has that “(A Girl) of (Someplace)” title style so popular around 1900. Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Alice of Old Vincennes, Rose of Old Harpeth, Beverley of Graustark... this last one is a cross-dressing Ruritanian romance. I should read it sometime.

ANYWAY. A Girl of Virginia is set at the University of Virginia, and offers a fascinating picture of life at campus and more generally in Virginia society at the time. Also the heroine picks the right hero in the love triangle! Heroines are so rarely allowed to pick the man that I personally believe they should pick. GOOD FOR YOU, FRANCES!

Anne McCaffrey’s hilarious misnamed The Mark of Merlin, which is not even slightly related to Arthurian legend. The titular Merlin is the heroine’s completely non-magical dog, who neither has nor makes any plot-relevent marks. Our heroine, Carla, is a little tiny spitfire on her way to frozen wastes of New England, where she gets snowed in with her big, brawny, scarred-in-mind-and-body-from-his-recent-service-in-World-War-II guardian Major Laird.

Does the romance plot progress as expected? One hundred percent. McCaffrey loves a brawny man manhandling a bratty itty bitty girl. Does the plot otherwise progress as expected? Absolutely not. I was surprised at every turn, and not just because the title made me expect Merlin to be far more plot relevant than he was. A solid mystery with lengthy pauses for beef stew and apple pie.

Continuing my Tasha Tudor journey with The Private World of Tasha Tudor photographed in loving detail by Richard Brown, who also photographed Tasha Tudor’s Garden and Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, the latter of which I also really want to read but also I can’t just let Tasha Tudor take over my entire life, can I? Can I? Should I. Would it be WISE. Will it end with me buying a corgi?

Like Tasha Tudor’s Garden, an enchanting book, putting the core in cottagecore. I especially enjoyed the details about Tudor’s dollhouse (there is of course a whole book about Tasha Tudor’s Dollhouse), and the marionette theater she and her children created, and her yearly holiday celebrations…

What I’m Reading Now

Slow but steady progress in Lord Peter. Most recently, Lord Peter found himself caught up in a ghost story, only the ghosts to turn out to have a non-supernatural explanation, of course. I would love to see him head to head with an actual ghost, though.

I also couldn’t resist starting Louisa May Alcott’s A Round Dozen, a dozen stories with illustrations by Tasha Tudor (which is how I stumbled across it). Most recently, a little boy witnessed a jamboree among the silverware set out on the dining room table awaiting the family Thanksgiving feast.

What I Plan to Read Next

The flesh is weak. I put a hold on A Time to Keep: A Tasha Tudor Books of Holidays. I love a holiday celebration, and I’m sure Tudor has some crackerjack ideas how to get the most holiday joy out of every season.
sholio: Gurathin from Murderbot looking soft and wondering (Murderbot-Gura)
[personal profile] sholio
I'm not sure if this is complete enough for AO3, but I got a delicious hurt/comforty prompt on Tumblr, and ended up writing 1800 words for it. (Prompt and fic under the cut.)

Update: Now posted on AO3 as Soft Reboot.

Expand1800 words of forced drugging )

Murderbot fanvid: I Lived

Jul. 14th, 2025 09:52 pm
sholio: tv murderbot andrew skarsgard looking to the side (Murderbot-MB)
[personal profile] sholio
Okay, vid-source-assisting enablers, your reward is here. ♥



With every broken bone, I swear I lived. Team/family vid. (Contains some sci-fi violence as per the show, flickering/flashing lights in a couple of scenes, and canon pairings in the background, but it's mostly focused on team + Murderbot.)

Song: I Lived
Artist: OneRepublic
Length: 03:57
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67565471
Tumblr: here

Having made this in a fit of exploding feelings today, I plan to get subtitles/downloads up soon (as soon as I remember how to do all of that; it's been ages since I made a vid!).

Temp download: Download from Dropbox (286 Mb, it's huge)

Life at the Hummingbird Cottage

Jul. 14th, 2025 04:45 pm
osprey_archer: (nature)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I just realized it’s been over a month since an update on life at the Hummingbird Cottage. This cannot stand! Surely you are all desperate to hear the latest news!

Still no hummingbird sightings, but there appears to be an entire flock of ducks resident on the pond, although they only come out en masse in moonlight so it’s hard to be sure how many there are. (Ghost ducks?)

The herbs are flourishing, especially the lemon balm which is the chief weed. I’ve been procrastinating on pulling it out, but at last it occurred to me that if I rip out the clump in the front garden, I could replace it with black-eyed susans (a favorite flower) and purple coneflowers (not a favorite, but they look well with black-eyed susans), which are both native wildflowers and also flourishing.

The intentional herbs are also doing well! I just found a recipe for herb scones which I’m looking forward to trying, since as soon as one has a flourishing herb garden one must begin scrambling for recipes that use herbs in order to keep the herbs in check. The chives are especially happy.

The cherry tomatoes in contrast are NOT happy. They both have a few little green tomatoes and look rather wilty, probably a combination of being planted late and not watered enough. Also one of them is beside a twining vine of some variety which began to engulf its tomato cage, so I moved the tomato cage over into the clump of vines which have since completely devoured it (really ought to get an arch or something, these vines are SO ready to go), which left the tomato plant free but also, possibly, a bit traumatized. And I expect the vine is sucking up more than its fair share of water and nutrients from the soil.

In non-garden news, I got a bike! It is a used Elektra Townie step-through bike, cream-colored with teal wheel rims and a capacious basket on the front which is just crying out for a baguette and a bouquet of wildflowers. I rode it to work for the first time today, coasting down the hill with the breeze in my face and a song in my heart… I will of course have to go back up the hill at the end of the day, but such is life.

To the house itself, I don’t think there have been any major alterations. The wicker cart I mentioned in my previous entry has been spray-painted white, and currently hosts two pothos plants (birthday presents!), although I intend to move them to higher ground so they can show off their trailing abilities. First I need to get a step stool, though, in order to water the pothos at its higher home.

Long term plans: a four-poster bed with soft white curtains. A built-in bookcase with a ladder in the living room. Presumably living room seating of some kind? (The living room is currently empty except for (1) a cat tree, (2) the wicker cart with the pothos, and (3) a box spring which came at a discount with the guest room twin mattress, which is for one of my friends, who needs to come retrieve it.) I feel the rest of the living room will fall into place once I get the bookcase sorted.

Superman 2025 thoughts, no spoilers

Jul. 14th, 2025 01:16 pm
petra: Superman looking downward with a pensive expression (Clark - Beautiful night)
[personal profile] petra
If the new Superman movie had included Súperman es Ilegal (lyrics in English and Spanish in video), even just a little bit, I might've felt all the whiners were justified in saying how woke it is. It's a charming movie with compelling performances, but "woke" is a serious overstatement by people who can't handle characters who aren't white dudes doing things.

This Ma and Pa Kent were my favorite iterations of themselves outside of comics, and I fully believed that this Clark would say, "Dang."

If you like your superheroes a little too clean-cut and a lot too earnest, you, too, may enjoy this flick.

Gratitudes dammit

Jul. 14th, 2025 09:31 am
kass: A glass of iced coffee with milk. (coffee)
[personal profile] kass
1. Murderbot! I deeply enjoyed the whole first season. I think they did a lovely job of translating from book into tv show, and Skarsgard has totally sold me on the role. (It helps that we know he loves the books too -- he wants to do right by them.)

2. Andor! I'm now seven episodes in and absolutely loving it. It feels awfully relevant to our moment. Also I am amused by the fact that this show also relies in part on the acting talent of a Skarsgard, just, y'know, a different one.

3. Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy by Martha Wells, published to celebrate the Murderbot S1 finale.

4. Cold coffee with milk and splenda, and a distant patch of blue in the cloudy skies.

5. All of my laundry is folded and put away. This is, as ever, a temporary state of affairs but it's a nice one while it lasts.
sholio: tv murderbot andrew skarsgard looking to the side (Murderbot-MB)
[personal profile] sholio


I watched this like 4 times in a row. It definitely contain spoilers, but it's divorced enough from the actual plotline of the show that if you don't mind SOME spoilers and want to get an idea of what the show is like, this might be a nice one to watch. (Warning for some gore.)

On AO3
sholio: tv murderbot andrew skarsgard looking to the side (Murderbot-MB)
[personal profile] sholio
[personal profile] scioscribe gave me a delightful Murderbot TV-verse prompt, hidden because it's somewhat spoilery for the finale:
Click to viewPost-finale Gurathin, burdened with all these memories of Sanctuary Moon, still doesn't like the show but now can't resist getting into nitpicky arguments about it on futuristic forums, where he and Murderbot keep crossing paths and gradually realize who they're talking to and get very fond about it without admitting to anything.


Expand600 words or so of future fan forum shenanigans )

(no subject)

Jul. 12th, 2025 09:28 pm
lakeeffectgirl: (Default)
[personal profile] lakeeffectgirl
I am on vacation AGAIN, which still feels like good motive to post - Lake, you might think, weren't you just on vacation? Yes, but I am still using up the vacation time from 2024 that I did not take because we were so short-staffed the whole flipping year. And now it's July and I haven't used any of 2025's vacation! Of which I have a lot because I have been at my job for twenty years now. Anyway! Our second attempt at finding a full-time third shift person starts on Monday, so I will immediately be training that person - but he has related knowledge in his previous job so should hopefully be a fairly quick train and was looking for something less stressful than his last job, which we are. (Unlike the last person, who quit because she was bored.) Crossing my fingers!

I have not done much while off - took my sister to the new Jurassic movie, which was decent. I am old enough to remember seeing the original in the cinema so none of the ones since have been as good. This one was closer to the original in tone, which I enjoyed, but the dinosaurs are all CGI now, and you can tell. Jonathan Bailey is the Alan Grant-style character in this and he got some good moments, and he's a fine actor, but as I am not a Bridgerton girlie I really don't care about him, lol. (Also his one really Alan moment would have been better if the dinosaurs in it weren't so stupid-looking! Their tails were idiotic! Gah!)

Also watched Sinners, which was great.

I have little else to report. I am still very into The Pitt and have many a WIP - two are basically done and just need me to be in the mood to edit/tinker and then post. I assume I will be in the mood eventually so am just letting the rough drafts be for now. Which is probably a good skill to practice, vs. hurrying up. Also waiting for fandom5k to open; it got pushed back another week so is now much closer to the end of the month. Which does give me more time to do another edit, I suppose.

Profile

dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
Dira Sudis

October 2024

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789 101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Expand All Cut TagsCollapse All Cut Tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 12:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios