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A hundred years from now, chroma key colors are going to be considered unlucky to wear in a set of professions like newscasting, and nobody is going to quite realize why.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/05/29/kafka-fragments/

nineveh_uk

The Giro d'Italia has by far the most evocative competition jerseys of the three grand tours of cycling. Forget France's yellow or Spain's red, what could beat the rosa, ciclamino, or azzura?

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Via

cosmolinguist

Sir Ian McKellen to open historic all trans and nonbinary production of Twelfth Night

oursin

My attention was recently drawn, as we say, to an early C20th composer, and I thought, that name sounds familiar, so I pottered off to look at my database of notes, and yes, they were hanging out in sex reform circles, interesting, no, especially as they seem generally to be described as 'reclusive' -

So anyway, I went to look up their entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and it is all about The Music (they were also apparently a top-level performer as well as prolific composer) and nothing about this other aspect.

And some while ago I perchanced to look up the ODNB entry for an early C20th lawyer whom I had come across in those same circles, and he was all about anti-censorship, and reforming the divorce laws (and we suspect also handling these sensitive matters for his mates in his professional capacity, no doubt) -

Very worthy.

He was also, I have come across indications in correspondence and biographies, rather a Not Safe In Taxis kinda guy, or at least, the handsy menace of the 1917 Club.

I don't actually know if there's a procedure for saying to editors of ODNB 'Hi, I have Further Info', let alone 'by the way, it's dishing the dirt'.

forestofglory posting in

ladybusiness

Last year I wrote an essay about cozy SFF. I started out writing a passionate defense of cozy SFF, then I wasn't quite happy with it and put it on the shelf for a while. When I got back to it, I realized there were some things about the current moment of cozy SFF that I don't really like. So I had to edit my piece. But even then I felt the conversation was getting away from me.

I've only become more frustrated with what's being marketed as cozy SFF and the discourse around it. I find the stuff being published isn't digging into the themes that I want to see. Meanwhile the discourse is both dismissive and full of moral panic. I think both that domestic labor and community building are important and worth telling stories about and shouldn’t be dismissed, and that it's ok to read soft comforting stories. I wish people would calm down a bit.

( Read more... )

james_davis_nicoll

My backup email is james@jamesdavisnicoll.com

Added later

My panix email has been restored.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/beyond-the-sun-by-matthew-jones/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61507

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.

When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.

I had written of the audio in 2007:

Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.

I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/beyond-the-sun-by-matthew-jones/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61507

andrewducker

Gideon's nursery had photos taken. I like them.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

pauraque posting in

common_nature

I got to see an Osprey sitting on its nest!

brown and white raptor sits on a nest at the top of a wooden pole

When I came back later to show my partner, we talked to another birder who said this nesting platform has been there for a long time but in past years Ospreys have only stayed for a short time and not fledged any young. This year they've stayed much longer than usual so hopes are high for a baby! The other adult was perched in a tree nearby.

Ospreys eat only fish. (The platform is above a river.) It's interesting that small birds seem to realize they're no threat, and completely ignore them. While we were there, we saw a flock of blackbirds furiously mob and chase away a Cooper's Hawk while the Ospreys calmly looked on.

james_davis_nicoll

All I need to do to restore them is to "cd into ~/.maildir" to pick a snapshot. In this context, what does that mean? Online search is not helpful.

OK, further explanation followed:

"You may well have deleted the *contents* of your inbox, but the inbox
itself is still there, as is that link in your home directory. So
(from your home directory):

cd .maildir
snapshot

look at the timestamps and pick the most recent one pre-deletion.

Inbox messages will be in the directory 'cur' once you are in a
snapshot. You can copy the files into ~/.maildir/cur (or
/users/jdnicoll/.maildir/cur"

Ok, so the literal command is
cd .maildir
snapshot

NOT
cd .maildir
and then
snapshot

This gets me a list of snapshots.

if I pick one, I get

Changing directory to /net/mail/spool/panix/7/.zfs/snapshot/2025-05-28-2000.hourly/3/jdnicoll@panix.com

What do I do next?

cosmolinguist

Sir Ian McKellen to open historic all-trans and nonbinary production of Twelfth Night

What's this, a trans reading of my favorite Shakespeare play, fundraising for my favorite trans charity (the one that brings me that "trans gym" thing I'm always talking about)?

And there's a livestream so I can stay covid-safe? And you can watch from anywhere (for two weeks after the live performance)?

I've already got my ticket!

cosmolinguist

This morning, a friend shared a screenshot of a social media post that says

i am a simple goblin

all i want is for someone to pet my head

and feed me whatever i want for dinner

without having to figure out what that is

forever ✨

I read this, and thought D's gonna say "oh look it Erik" isn't he (he's convinced I'm a goblin; I don't get it), and before I could even type anything, he said "Oh you found Erik's alt."

I laughed and said "Actually I require many more things than this. I am a needy goblin."

I mean yes those things would be nice -- though lately I've been very particular about what I can eat for dinner, sigh - but I was stuck on "all I want." So I added, "My counselor keeps asking me what it'd take to make things feel less overwhelming/burnouty for me, and I have a big list." Which is true! It's a mental list, but only because I'm scared to write it down.

D asked "Are any of them actionable?"

I laughed differently and much more bitterly at this. The unfeasibility is why I'm scared to write any of it down.

james_davis_nicoll

A historian's popular account of a well-known but surprisingly nebulously defined era.

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

aurumcalendula

I'm kinda excited that The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is getting deluxe hardcovers!

When I was looking at where it can be preordered, I discovered that Hudson Booksellers has functional listing for the deluxe boxset and a 20% off coupon (plus free USPS shipping over $55).

spiralsheep

- Reading: 58 books to 28 May 2025.

54. Cwen, by Alice Albinia, 2021, 5/5, is a trans-inclusive, anti-racist (anti-misogynoir), women-centred, feminist speculative utopian fiction set on an archipelago of small islands that are part of our contemporary British Isles but where 50% of local power has recently been legislated to women. Written in a very readable style, combining serious critique with the mischievousness of the best feminist fiction. Reminiscent of Ellen Galford (especially Fires of Bride updated and improved), probably intentionally although she doesn't get a namecheck unlike Marija Gimbutas, and the backstory of the islands includes a multicultural feminist separatist commune that fails but plants seeds of ideas and actions which I read as acknowledgement of the positive effects of second wave feminism.

The plot, which is unspoilerable, is that a leading local woman Eva Harcourt-Vane has died under not especially mysterious circumstances, after rowing out into a storm at sea, and bequeathed all her worldly possessions away from her three wealthy and politically influential sons who have demanded a Public Inquiry into the results of their mother's utopian feminism. Past and current events are then presented through the device of witnesses to that Inquiry, especially the dozen women who were most involved in Eva's cabal ( / coven / disciples): what they say in public, their private memories, and responses from other community members. There's a large cast of characters, who can be difficult to keep track of while reading, but many of the asides included from the Public Inquiry scenes appear to be intended as a Greek Chorus effect so the persona speaking isn't individually important and when a character does require closer attention in a scene it's obvious in context so readers don't need to track every utterance of every character for overall reading comprehension and enjoyment. There's also a supernatural element but readers can dismiss that as symbolic if they prefer. It sounds dry but the mix works well.

It's interesting that the situation in this novel is convincingly presented as a feminist utopia / gynotopia provoking massive backlash, but then undercut by the evidence given to the Public Inquiry which shows that what happened is not even equality for women e.g.: 50% representation in local government is under-representation; and the women's club isn't as luxurious and doesn't ban men as extremely as traditional men's clubs in the UK; and the reworking of museum exhibits only adds interpretations and accurately re-sexes the skeleton from a chambered cairn; and one woman working in an otherwise male-dominated field is seen as an unacceptable threat to men's livelihoods; &c.

The tone of this book is realistic encouragement: Utopia is here, and the revolution is always now, because here and now are the only possibilities and we should choose to live as much of the gynotopia in our lives as we can (men too, obv, unless you're one of those losers who finds 50% female a scary number).

I LOVED THIS. 5/5. :D

( Quotes and language use )

tamaranth

2025/081: The King Must Die — Mary Renault

‘Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.' [p. 17]

Definitely a reread, and I can remember when and where I first read it: in the library during study period in my third year at secondary school. I also remembered encountering the quotations from this novel in the chapter-headings of Watership Down, my favourite book when I was nine or ten years old... I remembered most of the details of The King Must Die, despite not having reread in the last couple of decades: I had forgotten (or never noticed) just how many hints of other myths -- Orpheus, an anachronistic Agamemnon, Jason -- are present, and how much they are woven into the theme of goddess-worship.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: happy

anna_wing

Three-legged Cat (TLC), last heard of in the dining-room, did not stay there. The nice, light bamboo barricade proved so light that he eventually worked out that he could actually shove it aside far enough to wriggle through (tomcats have serious muscle, specially after six months of feeding up, rest and recuperation). The Feline Drama reached positively operatic heights after that for weeks, to the point where everyone was having their meals in separate parts of the house, and food that had been acceptable for years was suddenly next thing to poison. There was protest peeing, and vomiting on the stairs, and hissy-spitty at the slightest opportunity. Lap-cat took to sleeping on the kitchen counters during the day (when I wasn't around to shoo him off) since TLC can't jump that high off just one back foot. Bus-stop Cat and Scaredy-Cat fled upstairs, where TLC doesn't go because he finds stairs awkward to manage.

Everyone was very glad when Housekeeper came home from her holiday and normal service could resume.

The current state of play is that everyone now sits like good cats waiting for their meals, and eats together in the kitchen. TLC doesn't go upstairs and is not allowed to go outside, so he has basically become the Kitchen Cat. After dinner everyone is usually willing to hang around in the sitting-room for a bit. Both TLC and Lap-cats are territorial lap-cats who want attention and my company (Bus-Stop Cat's territory is Housekeeper's room) and have a cautiously antagonistic relationship. Since Lap-Cat is much smaller than TLC, I have to be on the alert for bullying (luckily Lap-Cat is extremely vocal when he's unhappy, he doesn't just run away like Scaredy-Cat does). We're at the point where every night I sit on my sofa imitating the action of the Berlin Wall with a cat on each side, carefully stroking them both simultaneously, and ready to clamp down at the slightest untoward move. Everyone is now also using TLC's litterbox downstairs rather than the one upstairs. When I go to bed the two of them are sleeping in separate spots in the same room.

It's progress.

redbird

I'm fine, as far as I know everyone's fine, but my trip to get blood drawn was more exciting than anticipated: the bus driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid either a bicycle or a pedestrian crossing in mid-block. She did that, checked to make sure that everyone on the bus was OK, then drove to the next corner, pulled over, and asked again if everyone was sure they were OK.

A few stops after that, someone asked me where he should get off the bus to get to "the little mall with Trader Joe's and MicroCenter." It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, because the bus we were on doesn't go there. So first I told him I wasn't sure, because this bus didn't go there, and then I started thinking about the problem. He said he wasn't good at directions, so I suggested a route that involved more walking but less chance of getting lost. I wound up signaling for his bus stop, and then telling him I was sorry, I'd forgotten they'd moved the bus stop, so [revised directions]. I should note, he didn't ask me for most of this, just what bus stop to use, and I was in the mood to do the extra bits.

The rest of the trip to Mt. Auburn to get blood drawn went smoothly. Once I got there, I had very little wait, and the phlebotomist did a very good job; I made a point of telling him so. On the way back, I stopped in Harvard Square to put more money on my Charlie card; buy and eat a slice of Otto's mashed potato and bacon pizza; and then went to Lizzy's to get Adrian a pint of non-dairy chocolate ice cream.

I was going to withdraw some cash from the ATM at the 7-11 at Comm Ave and Harvard Ave, but when I got there the screen said "windows 7. Press ctrl-alt-del to log in," which was literally impossible with the numeric keypad, so I just came home.

kaberett

... include:

six months on from surgery: what's recovery looking like?
this is actually secretly mostly (but not entirely) about Pilates
grousing about getting the Framework actually set up Adequately under Debian (power management noooot doing what I want it to and the GPU seems to keep falling over; have not yet had time/brain to sit down with either the guide to Debian 12 or cross-referencing the way the Linux battery life tuning thread disagrees with the various guides for Ubuntu (which is an officially supported distribution)
What I Am Up To This Week

But everything is Very, so for now you just get the list.

chestnut_pod posting in

fffriday

Metal From Heaven by August Clarke

I recommend to everyone

skygiants' review for a perspective from someone who enjoyed this book more than me. I respected it, but I can't say I liked it. However, it is clear to me that many people would like this very much! A violently purple, ambitious fantasy story about lesbians who hate each other and the workers' revolution (sort of).

I felt like it careened out of its own control around the 2/3 mark (which is also where one can audibly start hearing the Evangelion theme song). However, if you like swirly-marbled psychedelic books with 90s anime antecedents where every character can be described as The [attractiveness adjective] [morality adjective] Lesbian, evil blue tangerines, and other people's trip diaries, this is for you. It's very very different, ambitious, and fresh, which one likes to reward, so I hope it gets lots of attention, even if it wasn't totally for me.

But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo

This was… basically okay. "Lady Mary and Mr. Fox" but lesbian horror-spiders. I appreciated how the Folklore Flavor details were specific in a way that I find sadly uncommon in this species of contemporary "monster" "romance" fantasy. It is stuck halfway between the broad strokes of a fairytale and the demands of a lengthier novella trying to have a mystery plot, and the romance is really just armature.

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, by Sarah Brooks

This is a blown egg of a book. There's a shell of cool things, like trans-continental trains, eco-horror gaslamp-style, a quasi-Rusalki in ambiguous love with the orphaned Chinese train-foundling, and alt-history, but the shell is all there is. Bombastic but substanceless.

Hopefully in the next few months I will read some new-to-me F/F which I can wholeheartedly love.

james_davis_nicoll

The complete Deluxe Editions of Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number, along with Wolves of God, Silent Legions, and more.

Bundle of Holding: Sine Nomine Corebooks (from 2023)

cosmolinguist

I can never remember which one's "adductor" and which one's "abductor," but now one of those is the machine in the gym that's for practicing to crush a watermelon between your thighs, and I think after I described it thusly to him tonight, that's what diffrentcolours and I are gonna be calling it from now on.

After that I started explaining all the machines in terms of watermelons. "This one's lifting watermelons, this one's punching watermelons..."

marthawells

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/david-dastmalchian-murderbot-dexter-resurrection-interview/

"Now I feel much more comfortable advocating for [what I need]. To give you an example, on the set of Murderbot, going to my directors and writers, the showrunners, Chris and Paul [Weitz], and saying, ‘I'm really sorry, but on Wednesday at 2pm - I know I'm on the schedule that day, but is there any way I could be in my trailer for 45 minutes to have a therapy session?' and them being so supportive and loving and saying, ‘Of course, we will get you a Wi-Fi booster,’ because we were out in the middle of nowhere.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugo-best-related-work-2025/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61307

6) The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford

What? I hear you exclaim. Given my own record on speaking out against the abuses of the Hugo process carried out by the organisers of Chengdu Worldcon, how can I possibly be ranking the Barkley and Sandford Report, which blew the bloody doors off the whole affair in February 2024, last on my Hugo ballot this year?

There are several reasons, which I will go into at greater length in due course. Most important, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures. But also, this Report misses a couple of vitally important issues revealed in its own detail and compensates with rhetoric. So I’m not voting for it, but it may well win the award anyway.

5) The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, by Jenny Nicholson.

This is a four hour long video report on a bad investment decision by Disney, to create a Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World in Florida. It looks nice, but I honestly think that the story is not worth four hours of vidding, let alone watching.

4) r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge

I think it’s brilliant that Reddit users got together to challenge each other to read more broadly, and the enthusiasm for this project is great. I just prefer my Best Related Works to be written commentary.

3) Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones

Now this is more like it, cold hard numbers demonstrating why the published statistics from the 2023 Hugos simply cannot be trusted. I was relieved but not surprised to see that the statistics from the years that I myself was involved generally do pass the mathematical smell test. Lots of beautiful numerical details here, which I’ve been chewing on occasionally ever since it was published.

As noted above, though, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures, so it’s not in my top two in this category.

2) Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll

Second paragraph of third chapter (actually Chapter 2, “Whitey on the Moon”, counting the introduction as the first chapter):

[Richard B.] Spencer expounded upon this idea at length in an early podcast that explicated Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) with alt-right essayist Roman Bernard. Interstellar caused a big stir among alt-right intellectuals because it expressed the widespread reactionary sentiment that the United States had undergone a serious social and technological decline. The country’s malaise, they suggested, could only be reversed by intrepid white explorers taking up where the Apollo missions left off. In the film, the United States has shifted all resources away from technological innovation and into food production after an environmental catastrophe reduces the planet to a dustbowl. Even as the government denies the possibility of spaceflight—they claim the moon landing was an expensive hoax—a secret NASA program strives to save humanity by sending settlers to colonize another planet.

A short, fascinating analysis of the extent to which the alt-right has drawn inspiration from science fiction, often from authors and works who would have been horrified that they were being used for these purposes. Alas, a very timely book given what has been happening in the USA of late. You can get it here.

1) Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum.

As its title suggests, 2312 is a novel driven less by story or characters, and more by the desire to capture a certain (fictional, futuristic) moment of human history. Robinson accomplishes this by trotting out all the best-known (and often-derided) tools of science-fictional worldbuilding, but also by referencing much of the work that has come before him. So 2312 often seems as much a commentary on visions of the future as one of its own.

Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm. You can get it here.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugo-best-related-work-2025/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61307

spiralsheep

Aurora Australis readalong 6 / 10, An Interview with an Emperor, by Alastair Mackay, post for comment, reaction, discussion, fanworks, links, and whatever obliquely related matters your heart desires. You can join the readalong at any time or skip sections or go back to earlier posts. It's all good. :-)

Text of An Interview with an Emperor, by Alastair Mackay:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/An_Interview_with_an_Emperor

Readalong intro and reaction post links:
https://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/662515.html

Reminder for next week, the poem Erebus by Nemo (Ernest Shackleton):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/Erubus

( Links, vocabulary, quotes, and brief commentary )

rachelmanija

Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.

The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

( Read more... )

Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.

oursin

What I read

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World (Dr Greta Helsing, #4) (2025): somehow did not like this as much as the preceding volumes in the series.

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time #5) (1960).

Latest Literary Review.

Discovered entirely by happenstance that Robert Rodi's scathingly irreverent comedies of manners set largely in Chicago’s gay demimonde' are now available as ebooks at exceedingly eligible prices (I read them in the 90s/early 00s from the local library) so have downloaded all those and also:

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (vol 1) (2014), which collects and expands on his blogposts on Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. which was quite addictive, the sort of thing I thought I'd be dipping into and in fact read end to end, even while dissenting from his take on Fanny Price and muttering that he was not exactly au fait with the discourse on JA's views on the slavery question.

On the go

This was perhaps at least partly motivated by coming to the point in Dragon's Teeth where we get the Reichstag Fire and its consequences, and Lanny is caught in the middle of a whole mass of cross-currents while trying to save those of his friends who think that they will surely be all right....

Bitch In a Bonnet vol 2 (2014): covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Up next

Well, KJ Charles, Copper Script is allegedly due to drop tomorrow....

hunningham

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. What it says on the tin. I am deeply interested in the woman's job as a comedy writer for a late-night show, and I do not give 2 hoots about lack-lustre romance with some guy. Back to the library it goes, and next time I will borrow that book about giant spiders.

Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney. I appreciate her journey, but really, do we have to do this again for every generation? Sigh. Yes, I know we do. See How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, which (sadly) hasn't dated at all. Romney does impress me by reading AND ENJOYING The Mysteries of Udolpho. Myself, I gave it two solid goes and just couldn't. The sublime poetry, the sublime landscape, the sublime feelings - just no. I couldn't.

But I do still have some paperbacks from the Pandora Press series 'Mothers of the Novel', and I'm feeling like a reread.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wednesday-reading-102/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61628

Current
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans

Last books finished
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Next books
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wednesday-reading-102/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61628

james_davis_nicoll

Lonely Rita has no end of meet-cutes with hunky men. If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head...

Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba

james_davis_nicoll

Mars fans anticipate trading only known habitable planet for world where any unprotected human would immediately perish

hunningham

Slept badly (awake since 3am) but I have been to the 7:30am crossfit class. The spur to getting myself up & dressed & out was that was a alert that my bicycle was booked in for a service. (And can we all applaud my past self who set the default calendar alerts to day before, 2 hours before, 1 hour before, & 30 mins before event.) I had said I would leave bike at shop between 8:30 & 9am So I got out, got exercised & deposited bicycle and now feel very virtuous and impressed with myself.

I have recently discovered (via Anna Jones) that (i) broad bean pods are edible and (ii) that I really like them. This morning I tossed some broad-beans (in the pod) in olive oil and roasted them in a hot oven for 15 mins, until they were just starting to char. Then I tossed them in a dressing - olive oil, lots of chopped dill and just a taste of vinegar. Delicious. I have already eaten them all. The beans themselves can be eaten with the pods (which I do) or removed and cooked separately.

I have also started a new batch of yoghurt. The last batch didn't work - I had set it up to strain and then forgot about it until the next day. It was solid - not like cheese, but much more rubbery like that. It was like edible window putty.

pilottttt posting in

common_nature

For more details about our trip to this desert (in Russian), see here: https://pilottttt.dreamwidth.org/445028.html

oursin

Happy birthday,

genarti and

green_knight!

tamaranth

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

redbird

This year's Wiscon was all-online, and billed as a "gap year," with fewer program items than I'm used to, and no dealers room.

I went to two program items--a "US immigration law and worldwide fandom roundtable" and a panel on "the wild world of modern agtech and why isn't it showing up in current SF."

The roundtable was about as cheerful as you'd expect, with a lot of discussion of both past and feared legal difficulties in traveling to cons, and alternatives like smaller gatherings and online cons. Most of us thought that online wasn't as good as in person, but that it's significantly better than nothing. (There may be some selection bias here: people who didn't think an online con was better than nothing wouldn't bother attending.) And a couple of people noted that their choice has been online or nothing at least since 2020, for reasons like disability or budge that don't have much to do with Trump.

The panel on current and future agriculture was fun. Some of the "what SF is getting wrong" was about TV and movies, showing a garden plot that's much too small for the population it's allegedly feeding, and that the fictional future is even worse/stupider about monoculture than the real world today.

Other than that, I hung out on the Discord server. Most if not all of the program items were recorded, and will be available to convention members for a week after the end of the con, but I may not get around to watching any of them, even less interactive things like readings and the guest of honor speeches.

wychwood

I finally completed Dragon Age: Veilguard, after only four months. ( I enjoyed it! with spoilers )

Other games: I played the rest of Carto, which is a very enjoyable little map puzzle game and I recommend it; I started Submerged but didn't get very far with it, played a bit of Loddlenauts and liked that better, will probably play more; picked up Quilts and Cats of Calico which has a ridiculous story mode that I'm working through, finished the second act but got stuck on one puzzle where my solution appears to be mathematically correct but doesn't get the right number of cats so I must be misunderstanding a rule somewhere, much more overtly math-y than I was expecting somehow; progressed my re-play of The Secret Order 2: Masked Intent which is as ridiculous as all my Artifex Mundi games but still oddly satisfying; and played a few minutes of Psychonauts after Sunday's video game concert included a track from it and I realised that the name was familiar because it was already in my Steam library. That one was mildly entertaining, but the interface feels a bit janky and the graphics are hideous (...it is twenty years old, probably not surprising); I'll probably try a bit more.

oracne

1. I participated in Science! This involved an MRI of my right calf while at rest and before, during, and after doing a minute of movement. I got paid, and used part of it to finally buy the Shape Note song book a college friend (from choir) worked on. The next step is to try and make at least a few of the monthly sings in my neighborhood this summer, while I'm off from regular choir.

( Read more... )

azurelunatic

We know about Decaf, where by some process, caffeine is removed from coffee or whatever.

I present: Recaf. Where maybe decaf isn't doing it today so you add in a bit of caffeine powder or something.

(I have a flask of decaf on me today, and then we stopped for breakfast and got Coke, and I said "recaf" and had to make the definition.)

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: just past Mickey D's
Current Music: Defcon One

elisheva_m posting in

little_details

I'm trying to write a scene where two co-workers are trouble-shooting a new custom security or encryption routine. Someone else (who isn't present) wrote the code and he will have been careful to ensure it works before sending it to them. So maybe something in the implementation of it?

The scene is dual purpose, showing their interaction growing closer while also hiding something else in plain sight. The tech part of it can be whatever is plausible and easy to convey without bogging it down in details. I am so out of touch with that sort of thing I don't know what's plausible any more.

What could go wrong with uploading the new code into their office network or onto their phones which would need a bit of trouble-shooting? The kind of thing one person might overlook and another catch. Preferably with them being literally close while they do this. And again - easy to convey without bogging it down in details. Jargon is fine.

Edit: Turns out jargon is not fine. Well it would be in the sense I meant, but that's not how it was taken. Am overwhelmed by how much I can't understand well enough to follow here, let alone distill into a few phrases. I know the readers for my lakorn-novel are non-existent but I can't swamp them with details.

Edit 2: Sorry to have bothered everyone. I'm just going to trash this. It was a stupid idea in the first place. Thank you for your time.

hunningham

It's a soft grey day and it's been raining. Pleasant. Gentle. My father's wife was from Mexico, and she could not believe that I truly like the English (or the Scottish or the Irish) weather. She really thought I had been indoctrinated at some point (possibly by my father?). But I do like soft grey rainy days, especially since we've had a month of unrelenting sun (hello climate change) and we really need the rain.
Himself is listening to The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik and I am tickled by this, because I know Novik primarily as a superfan. Himself has heard of fanfiction, but that's as far as it goes - his internet and my internet are very different places. I want to give him some of astolat's fanfiction and see what he makes of that.
I have been to crossfit this evening. First time since 23 April and the class had both front squat and lunges. I am going to be so very sore tomorrow. But it's good to go back.
Yesterday I wrote that I had had a lazy do-nothing weekend; I had forgotten that I spent Sunday afternoon learning about Cloudflare configuration and setting it up for a site I manage. The site has been swamped by bots scraping contents for LLMs, and now it's all under control. I'm happy, my client is happy and I had a lovely time setting it all up. Sometimes I like working at weekends, it's quiet, no one expects me to answer emails and I can get on with things.

aurumcalendula

The Tall Target (1951)
( Read more... )

Lincoln (2012)
( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

I introduced my counselor to the "stress bucket" metaphor today.

Some of you may remember it was a Gary thing. I described it here:

The stress bucket is a metaphor about a bucket with a little hole in the bottom. Stress fills up the bucket. The little hole gradually empties it. We learned about what things are good for emptying a dog's stress bucket quicker and also how long the effects of an overflowing stress bucket can hang around.

It immediately made sense to me as someone with chronic anxiety, so while we carried on using it about Gary (it was always so useful), I apply it to myself too. And when my counselor was getting tangled in some other metaphors that reminded me of this, I told it to her. She seemed to really like it and extending the metaphor was useful for us during the whole conversation.

My good little dog, still helping out my brain even now.

oursin

Was alerted to Zoom seminar I must have signed up for ages ago and not put into my diary, with link, approx 30 mins before it was due to happen.

Well, that was interesting and informative: 'Protest and Identity Formation in the Time of Covid: The UK in Historical Context', if ultimately rather grim.

Given that I am in the cohort that thinks the response of The Powers That Be was very much in the Day Late and a Dollar Short ballpark and marked by gross ineptitude even where corruption was not in play, I had not realised how much there was resistance based on the belief that it was an excuse for the imposition of The Iron Heel (and this crisscrossed a wide spectrum of beliefs).

And a lot of the evidence for that was actually not widely reported.

And one observes that there are doubtless differences between the overall picture and the impact of immediate local policing practices.

But looking at what one might consider the wider penumbra of the panic (the torching of 5G towers e.g.) I was reminded (I would be, wouldn't I) of some of the episodes in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, especially as the speaker invoked the Black Death as a comparison point for epidemic + social upheaval.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/city-of-last-chances-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61488

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Langrice had shrugged. “Magister.” Speaking Pel easily because running the Anchorage meant you needed to be good with languages. “No Ilmari will work for me. It’s bad luck. Only the desperate will even come buy a drink from me. Or those who need to leave Ilmar the least convenient way.” She’d shaken her head ruefully, as though she’d give up the Anchorage and its trade in a moment if only there was someone else. “They won’t even take my money from my hands. I have to send my staff to market, or else pay some middleman. So why, exactly, would I not work with you Palleseen?”

Won the BSFA Award for Best Novel two years ago, against The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift and The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award that year, and Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell and The This by Adam Roberts, which we didn’t. City of Last Chances was also submitted for the Clarke, but is pretty clearly fantasy rather than sf, so I put it on one side for later. (To remind you: we gave the Clarke to Venomous Lumpsucker, the Nebula went to Babel and the Hugo, officially at least, to Nettle & Bone.)

I don’t think I voted in this category, and if I had a vote now I’d vote for The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake ahead of City of Last Chances, but this is nonetheless a very good book, set in a fantasy city which has recently been occupied by invaders, where the various ancient civic institutions, including the magical ones, continue to function despite the change of rules, and further potential social ferment is brewing. There is a particularly effective twist in the middle, and a slightly discarded deity who attaches himself to one of the main protagonists. It is, er, a bit long at 496 pages. You can get it here.

I’ve run out of Tiptree and Clarke winners to read, so there are only two left in this sequence which I started with Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop back in 2012; a twelve and a half year reading project comes to an end. I think I’ll replace it with a project of reading a book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man; there are 29 of them by my count. It’s good to have a target.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/city-of-last-chances-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61488

james_davis_nicoll

A flamboyant thief fulfills a seemingly minor commission and wins the attention of an alarming number of patriots from two empires.

The Crown Jewels (Divertimenti, volume 1) by Walter Jon Williams

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white_hart

May 2025

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chestnut_pod in fffriday - A few short, middling reviews from the year so far
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fromtheheartofeurope_feed - Hugo Best Related Work 2025
spiralsheep - Aurora Australis readalong 6 / 10, An Interview with an Emperor
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fromtheheartofeurope_feed - Wednesday reading
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james_davis_nicoll - Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba
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oursin - (no subject)
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oursin - Saying, what no flagellants - then thinking, actually, might be preferable
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