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https://otherpaw.wordpress.com/2025/06/02/il-gattopardo-2025/

I saw a hummingbird on Saturday!

I think my premieres went over well at VidUKon! I definitely going be catching up on/ rewatching vishows this week (timezone stuff meant a missed watching a bunch of them live).

I made a bunch of progress on my Georgiou vid (it went from a timeline that was maybe a third full to one that is ~80% full). ...although this did mean I didn't make any subtitle timing progress (I'm planning on working on that tonight).

james_davis_nicoll

I like to look at online real estate listings to see how people use interior spaces. I've come to the conclusions that:

A: Few people use more than 2000 square feet effectively. Above that, they seem to run out of ideas about how to use each room*.
B: Lots of houses have gratuitous features whose purpose seems to be to make them unusable to mobility impaired people.
C: (this is the stupid one) Townhouses are fine but I hate the idea of a duplex. For some reason, having to cooperate with 50 people bothers me more than having to get along with one specific person or family.

* More libraries is always the right answer.

There was a place for sale just up the road from me whose entire basement was given over to sturdy-looking bookcases.

jesuswasbatman

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

oursin

Happy birthday,

bearshorty,

sylvaine and

trinker!

selenak

This in fannish and rl political matters was not a good past week, but what is anymore, one is tempted to ask. But it wasn't universally bleak, either.

Wheel of Time cancelled: a pity. I was only so so about it in the first season, grew to like it in the second, and was impressed by the third. Where it had felt like starting out on a generic fantasy pattern (heroes called to quest, evil dark overlords and minions wrecking the land), it had truly become its own unique thing. Yes, I could still read the books, but I osmosed that many of the things I liked best about the tv version are in fact different to the books (for example, unless I osmosed wrongly, Rand is the clear main character in the books, while if there is any lead on tv, it's Moraine, Liandrin is a simple Evil McEvil villainess in the book where in the tv version she has backstory and complicated feelings, and "more complicated" is true for other villains as well, Moraine's sister Alvaere (spelling?), wonderfully played by Lindsay Duncan, only exists as a name in the books and her relationship with Moraine not at all, and the books have only same sex subtext where the show has main text, etc.). I wanted to follow this specific version of the tale, and now I won't be able to.

(Also, I'm reminded of how annoying I always found back in the day and sometimes years later when B5 and DS9 were played out against each other; I loved both, and refused to play that game, and interaction with other fans was tricky if you wanted discussions of one only to to come across rants about the other. It's not that I love Rings of Power, but I do like it, and if it was difficult already to come across interesting meta, now there will be additional bile blaming it on a note of "why wasn't this cancelled instead".)

The Mouse channel put up Captain America: Brave New World on its streaming service. I hadn't bothered to see it in the cinema after getting only discouraging noises, and while sometimes I come across media loathed by most which I love or at least like, this wasn't the case here. It had some elements I liked, but simply wasn't very good. I do wonder whether Captain America: The Winter Soldier is for the MCU what Star Trek: Wrath of Khan was for decades for the ST franchise - to wit, the movie most of fandom adores and loves best and which subsequently gets imitated over and over to the detriment of the results because they don't succeed in creating something of equal value and the repeated tropes get less convincing the more they're repeated. In the MCU case, subsequent attempts to combine 70s style political thriller with the superhero formula included the dreadful Secret Invasion which everyone seems to silently agree never to have happened since it's been ignored by the rest of the franchise, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was decidedly mixed in quality and result (though definitely better than Secret Invasion). Some short observations why despite having good actors and some good ideas, Brave New World just didn't stick the landing (imo, as always) in its attempt to recreate Winter Soldier: ( are spoilery. )

Doctor Who ?.08: Reality War: Which felt at times like RTD throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks, at times like (great) trolling, and at times was surprisingly touching giving everything else. ( Spoilery comments await )

***

Peter David the writer died. Back in the 1990s, I loved reading most of his Star Trek novels, especially but by no means exclusively Imzadi and Q-Squared. (I haven't reread them in decades by now, and have no idea whether they would still hold up, but I remember the reading pleasure they gave me, and how they long before the internet provided me with online fanfic showed how a story can enhance and deepen characterisation as given by a tv show.) On the B5 side of things, he contributed two episodes, including Soul Mates in season 2, which is still one of my all time favourites, and in it he created who is definitely my favourite one episode only on Babylon 5 character, Timov. (His B5 books were more of a mixed affair, but this is not the place to repeat my problems with the Centauri trilogy and its (lack of) worldbuilding.) If a writer is able to gift you with characters that remain with you for the rest of your life, that is more than many of us will ever achieve, so, hail and farewell, Peter David.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Munich

muninnhuginn

May 2025

Read:

Shorts:

Across the River, My Heart, My Memory by Ann LeBlanc
Zeitgeber by Greg Egan
Making Us Monsters by Sam J. Miller & Lara Elena Donnelly
And Now the Shade by Rich Larson
The 4:10 to Tarick by Alex Atkins

Non-fiction

Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI by Soatok
‘The crux of all evil’: what happened to the first city that tried to ban smartphones for under-14s? by Amelia Gentleman
Beorn and Bombadil @ ThoughtsOnTolkien
The value of institutional memory by Tim Harford
The Price of Remission by David Armstrong
Garmin Pay: yes, you can do NFC tap-to-pay in stores without big tech by Thom Holwerda
GrapheneOS: Where Licenses Matter More Than People @ https://fireborn.mataroa.blog

Visited:

Wimpole Hall (grounds)

Attended:

Henry Normal and Brian Bilston @ The Corn Exchange
Burnaby Recital @ Emmanuel College
The Waterboys @ The Corn Exchange
Peggy Seeger (online)

ETA: Spotted:

Little egret (on Ditton Meadows)

tamaranth

2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault

The fire leaped high; it shone down the long stone-lined cutting into the mound, showing the painted doorposts of the burial vault, the new bronze hasps of the open doors, and the Erechthid snake upon the lintel. But it did not pierce the dark beyond; sometimes when my back was turned I could feel him standing in the shadows beyond the doorway to watch his rites, as they show dead men in the funeral pictures. [loc. 336]

Sequel to The King Must Die: I think as a teenager I read this first, an old paperback from the jumble sale. Narrated again by Theseus, it's the story of everything that happens after his return from Crete: his father's funeral, becoming king, his friendship with Pirithoos the Lapith (a Bad Influence, to be honest), his relationship with the Amazon Hippolyta, their son Hippolytus and Theseus' frustration with his chosen life... There are curiously primitive Kentaurs, an encounter with Oedipus, and a foreshadowing of Paris's Judgment: also a fleeting encounter with a young Achilles. And through it all, warp and weft, Theseus's sense of the gods: his religious and spiritual practices.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: nostalgic

hunningham

One of the things I did last month when I was up in Scotland was set Lorna up with her very first smartphone. I'm afraid that the main impetus for the new phone is that she wants to use Uber. She's going to have to give up her car soon and Uber is cheaper than taxis. (Also there's only one taxi-driver in the village and Lorna doesn't like her. I don't know what the poor woman has done.)

Anyhows I am now calling or whats-apping Lorna every day, and if there's a problem I call her on the landline and we see what went wrong (swipe, not press). We have installed an app for birdcalls, and the Uber app, and she's managed to send messages to the grandchildren.

Lorna has to go to the eye-hospital at the end of June and that's going to be her big Uber trip; she has it all planned out. She will catch the bus to the bus-station and from there it will be an Uber. And if she has problems, she will find a young person (someone under sixty) and show them the phone (show them the phone, not give them the phone) and ask for help. I am so very proud of her, especially the "ask a young person for help" plan. My mother does not ask for help easily, or willingly.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

common_nature

These pictures are from Sunday, but it's after midnight, so the post says Monday.

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

redbird

My GI doctor says the celiac test is negative. This is both unsurprising and a relief: the doctor ordered the test because of comorbidities, not because there were any signs of celiac, but celiac is common enough in people with collagenous colitis that it was worth checking.

I do still need to contact her office tomorrow and ask about that follow-up appointment.

Current Mood: relieved

kaberett

Reading. Finished: a comfort reread of your blue-eyed boys, which fit the bill excellently. Have only restrained myself from launching straight into (even if I could) make a deal with god (and for that matter the other two series) on the grounds that I need to reread Prophet (Helen MacDonald, Sin Blaché) so that I can properly appreciate rydra_wong's a word you've never understood.

You see, I read the first two paragraphs, had a lot of feelings, and promptly decided the way to Maximise Feelings would be to do the reread I didn't set off on immediately after first finishing it.

Thus far I am going "my goodness, I forgot a lot of the detail here". ( Spoilers... )

I have also listened to a little bit more of Furiously Happy (Jenny Lawson). There are definitely aspects I don't love (like, as someone who is taking an antipsychotic for non-psychosis reasons, and someone who can at this point go entire years plural without any significant episodes of even very mild psychosis, the way antipsychotics are discussed makes me... a bit twitchy), and I'm annoyed by how much more disruptive needing to reread sentences is in audio than in text (and how much more frequently I'm needing to do it), but also it turns out rather to my own surprise to be a thing I can listen to when I'm not doing anything else with my brain, provided I don't mind not really retaining any of it for longer than about five minutes.

Eating. I have been fed a slightly ludicrous amount of (more-or-less responsibly harvested) wild asparagus this week, which has been A Delight.

A Variety of other things, courtesy of having someone else doing meal prep all week. Still suspicious of Nutritional Yeast, mind.

FIRST STRAWBERRIES from the plot.

Growing. Swung by the plot this evening (courtesy of significant support from A) and in addition to STRAWBERRIES: ( Read more... )

hunningham

I am reading Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen by Robert Rodi (thank-you to oursin for the rec) and am taking much more pleasure from the reading than I did from Jane Austen's Bookshelf. Now I am imagining Austen's books illustrated by John Leech instead of Hugh Thomson
The bathroom is finished. The shower was fixed without demur or difficulty. The electrician came back and now we have a heated towel rail (height of luxury) and it's all very pristine & cool green tiles. My mother has given me some mr.muscle spray for cleaning tiles & I may even use it.
My newsletter got done. Or doneish enough that I could send it out to other people for review. I went out for cafe brunch to celebrate the doneness and had eggs & 2 large coffees & amazing brownie which I ate very very slowly. And then I came home and, emboldened by brownie, emailed peeps to say 'guys, running out of energy & enthusiasm here can someone else takeover this the newsletter thing'.
Himself has been away for the weekend and is now back. I had a sibling zoom and it was good. I will sleep well tonight.

wychwood

For once in my life, I've had an actual quiet week! It won't last (this week is fairly jam-packed) but I have enjoyed it.

I turned my mattress for the end of the month as usual, but I really think it's dead now. The new side isn't so bad, but the one I've been sleeping on in May has a real canyon in the middle now. I asked my family what I should do, and they have all informed me that I should expect to spend £1500 for a good new mattress, and I might have to delay the purchase for several months while I adjust to the concept and my savings account braces for the impact. But, as they pointed out, I anticipate spending 8+ hours a day on it for the next ten years, and if I cheap out then I can expect to pay for that in other ways. Is that really normal now?? Or are my family just extravagant bed-buyers?

Work has been surprisingly quiet, too; I've actually been looking at some of the lingering tasks on my to-do list, even. Our big project is close to wrapping up - on Friday we were talking about go-live dates in mid-June and I am psychologically unready, but I have to admit that we're nearly done on the outstanding items, so... What will I do with myself once it's finished?? However, tomorrow is first working day of the month, so I'll have two days of reporting to keep me from having to think about it too hard.

I have made minor progress on various tasks at home, and scheduled some more regular reminders to do things (although right now there's a drift of overdue tasks in the to-do list app...). This morning I crosschecked my music collection spreadsheet with my music collection soundtrack folder, and added a considerable number of items; I ought to do the same with the classical and popular folders, which are rather larger, but... I don't want to. Maybe I'll put them on the to-do list.

I also ran out of space on my phone again - ongoing annoyance: phone says it needs to update Firefox (71MB) but can't because there's not enough free space (894MB). I assume there are good reasons to do it this way, but I would really like it if the phone would tell me how much space it needed, rather than my simply having to run around deleting things and trying again until it finally installs. Anyway, this time I ended up moving my entire camera history off the phone onto my computer, going through them and deleting all the really terrible photos, duplicates, pictures of my meter readings / malfunctioning work ticket kiosks / seating diagrams for choir, etc, and then moving the survivors back onto the SD card on my phone. Which was actually quite a useful task in itself, and did eventually free up enough space to update Firefox. I probably need to think about planning for a new phone (this one is over six years old) but I am feeling expensive enough already.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/06/01/ccoc-reprises-the-monkiest-king/

oursin

This week's bread: a loaf of 50:50% strong white and einkorn flour, with a little splash of oil when making up, turned out very nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, strong brown flour, and Rayner's Classic Organic Barley Malt Extract, which is much nicer than most other malt extracts.

Today's lunch: pseudo-spanokopita, spinach sauteed in butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg and lemon thyme, pie-dish lined with sheets of filo brushed with olive oil, layer of the spinach, soft cheese, rest of spinach, more sheets of filo, baked for 45 mins in a very moderate oven; served with baked San Marzano tomatoes and white chicory quartered, healthy-grilled in walnut oil and splashed with bramble vinegar.

andrewducker

British Voters are happy that UK net migration is down. But they still think it's too high. Sadly, there is no information about how much immigration voters would like, but I suspect that they think that zero is good. And probably that negative is better.

And a fair chunk of this is because Labour and the Conservatives are both backing the idea that immigration is a bad thing. Lib Dems are in favour of being more humane about it than either of them, but only the SNP seem to have a policy that recognises that if immigration doesn't go up the economy is fucked.

Britain is aging. With serious economic consequences, with insufficient people entering the workforce to make up for the people leaving it, and increasing healthcare costs.

If we want the economy to function then either we will have to have more children or to bring more people in to work here. Those are the two options. And nobody has successfully managed to get a developed society to do the former*. So either we deal with an insupportable economy or we increase immigration. But neither of the big political parties wants to deal with the Daily Mail screaming at them, so we're going to spend the next few years doing the economically** stupid thing.

* Except Israel. Who we are unlikely to emulate.
** Obviously I haven't touched on the moral case here.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-venezuela/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61518

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Venezuela.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Dragons in the Waters	Madeleine L’Engle	4,810	1,393
Green Mansions	William Henry Hudson	3,251	1,811
Doña Bárbara	Rómulo Gallegos	5,804	517
It Would Be Night in Caracas	Karina Sainz Borgo	7,368	241
The Sun and the Void	Gabriela Romero Lacruz	3,699	408
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon	Redmond O’Hanlon	1,558	638
Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People	Napoleon A. Chagnon	1,327	705
The Caiman	Maria Eugenia Manrique	2,393	120

This table sees one of the biggest variations between LibraryThing and Goodreads that I have yet seen. The top-ranked book on LibraryThing is fifth on Goodreads; the top-ranked book on Goodreads is seventh on LibraryThing; the winner on aggregate is second on one system and third on the other. Even bigger divergences would have appeared if I had gone further down the table.

And of all my childhood favourites, I did not expect to see Madeleine L’Engle, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, winning this week’s prize. But indeed, Dragons in the Waters is about a kid going to Venezuela to take over his inheritance, both natural and supernatural.

Venezuelan writers pick up half of the spots this week. Surprisingly, only It Would Be Night in Caracas is directly about the current political situation.

Of the others, The Sun and the Void is set in a fantasy country that as far as I can tell the author wants us to read as Venezuela. The Ya̦nomamö live in both Venezuela and Brazil, but Venezuela has adopted Chagnon’s book, so I’m happy to go along with that.

I disqualified seven books. A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende, is mainly set in Spain and Chile, and only in Venezuela at the end. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about the end of the life of Simon Bolivar, in what is now Colombia. Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, is about the entire continent. Bruchko, by Bruce Olson, unpleasantly straddles the border with Colombia but seems to be more on the other side. When Time Stopped, by Ariana Neumann, is about a Venezuelan discovering her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana, covers Simon Bolivar’s life and career all over the region. And Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, by Margarita Engle, sounds very sweet but is set mainly in the USA.

Coming next: Niger, Australia, North Korea and Syria.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-venezuela/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61518

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/winning-at-webdiplomacy/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61586

I’ve spent some time recently revisiting a teenage enthusiasm for the game of Diplomacy, in which (ideally) seven players with differently matched forces try to dominate the map of Europe circa the start of the twentieth century. The webDiplomacy site allows you to test your mettle not only against human players, but also against AIs. This can go quite fast, at a move every minute or so.

I am horrified and fascinated that the AIs continually defeat me, a mere human player. The couple of times I’ve tried “Gunboat Diplomacy” (where there is also no communication) with real humans, I found the going much easier, as opponents with brains made out of meat are more likely to make mistakes. Out of a couple of dozen battles with AIs, I have won only two; one where as Turkey I managed to break out of my corner before the rest of the countries had properly got started (which I think is the least difficult way to win against the software), and another as Italy where I combined good luck with a couple of good tactical shouts and a coherent overall strategy.

I realise that reading about other people’s solo games is about as interesting as hearing about other people’s dreams, but heck, this is my blog and so I’m going to tell you about how I beat the robots as Italy, which is normally seen as one of the weaker of the seven Great Powers – the others being Austria (sic), England (sic), France, Germany, Russia and Turkey. In summary, I did it by waging aggressive war successively on Austria and then Turkey, and benefited from a prolonged stalemate between England, France and Germany and a curiously passive Russia.

Taking it turn by turn::

1901

Three builds as Italy in 1901! That never happens. At this stage I seriously began to consider the possibility that I might be able to win the game. That French fleet in Marseille was a bit worrying, though with Brest blocked I guess there was no alternative.

1902

Autumn 1902 retreats: the Austrian army in Budapest was forced to disband. (I think the arrows in Brest are to show that you could not retreat there.)

Winter 1902 builds: Only me and Germany. And the northwestern half of the board all looked rather stuck.

1903

Autumn 1903 (retreats): I crushed the Austrian army in Serbia, while Germany also eliminated the English fleet in Belgium – the only supply centres to change hands this year.

Winter 1903: again, only Germany and I had builds. This is the point where, in a human game, Russia and Turkey would have agreed that I was the common threat and combined to resist me. But the AIs didn’t realise that I was now quite far ahead.

1904

Autumn 1904: A gamble that Russia would not try and retake Rumania or stab at Vienna paid off, allowing me to consolidate forces on their border; but my attacks on Bulgaria and Smyrna both failed. Even so, I think this was the point of no return, with my six units in the southern theatre facing four Turks and two Russians who were unable to coordinate.

Winter 1904 builds: With stalemate in the north and resistant crumbling in the south, I was the only country with new units – two of them, in return for Greece and Rumania. An army in Venice of course just to keep an eye on France; but rather than build a fleet in Naples, I opted for another army, with an eye on swiftly overrunning Turkey.

1905

Autumn 1905: Thanks to the capture of Constantinople, my attack on Turkey was running ahead of schedule. However, I felt that the best way to consolidate would be a tactical move from Constantinople to Smyrna, combined with the attack on Bulgaria which was now unstoppable – in fact the Turkish army in Bulgaria moved to Constantinople, with support from the Black Sea, when it saw me coming. Meanwhile France captured both London and Liverpool.

Autumn 1905 retreats: massive annihilations, with the German army in Edinburgh, displaced by England, and the English fleet in London, displaced by France, both attempting to retreat to Yorkshire and both therefore destroyed; meanwhile further south, Germany kicked France out of Burgundy. And my attack on Smyrna eliminated the Turkish fleet there.

Winter 1905 builds: I got another two, for Bulgaria and Smyrna! Germany got a build to replace the lost army which had briefly occupied Edinburgh, and France had space for only one of the two builds that London and Liverpool would have given it. England was now down to two fleets clinging to the Scottish coast, and an undefended Norway.

1906

Autumn 1906: the main action for me was to finish Turkey off by capturing Ankara while securing Constantinople, with support from Smyrna and Armenia; and I now had enough wiggle room to try opportunistic moves to Ukraine and to the Gulf of Lyons. But I misjudged the Constantinople attack, and should have done it the other way round, with Smyrna supporting a move from the Aegean rather than vice versa.

Autumn 1906 retreats: My misjudgement allowed the last Turkish army to escape from Ankara to Smyrna.

Winter 1906 builds: despite losing Smyrna, I had gained Constantinople and Ankara, so I was still up one, and could now start looking around for how I might get to 18 centres. A fleet in Naples seemed a better option than yet another army in Venice.

1907

Autumn 1907: With the imminent elimination of Turkey, my troops were now ready to break north to Russia and west to Spain. Again, if humans had been playing Russia, Germany and France, they could have co-ordinated against me. In fact I see that the German army in Silesia did support the Austrian army in Warsaw, which I could otherwise have captured.

Winter 1907 builds: I couldn’t quite believe it, but with my three spring gains of Marseille, Sevastopol and Smyrna, I got three builds and a total of 16 centres, only two short of victory; and Spain, Portugal and Moscow were all hanging open.

1908

At this stage there is no point in being nice to people (especially if they are robots). I made sure of Spain and tried for the Mid Atlantic Ocean; the AI playing France was still fighting with England over Edinburgh and with Germany over Burgundy, allowing me to slip in on its western flank. To the East, I had enough firepower to capture a vacant Moscow. Down along the bottom, I slipped an army into Tunis for later use.

This was the end. The army which had started the year in Smyrna finished it in Spain, though France could have prevented it; my fleet strolled along the coast into Portugal; I grabbed Warsaw off the disarrayed Russians; and what the heck, I had a couple of spare armies and had an unsuccessful go at Munich too. Up north, France recaptured Burgundy and finally took Edinburgh, for what that was worth.

Three retreating units, but it made no difference.

So I ended the game with a massive 20 centres, which I don’t think I have ever managed before. None of the others had had more than eight at any stage.

So, I beat the AIs at their own game, which was rather pleasing; though I was helped by the French robot’s determination to keep attacking England rather than defend against me, and by the curious inaction of the Russians. Let’s have a nice little gloat chart:

I’ll finish with one more thing that happened after I had first written this post: I learned from Ansible that John Boardman, who started the entire postal Diplomacy hobby in the early 1960s, died a few days ago at the age of 92. I never had any direct dealings with him, but he was the source of much enjoyment for a lot of people.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/winning-at-webdiplomacy/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61586

james_davis_nicoll

Five books new to me: 4 novels, 1 collection, 3.5 fantasies, 1 horror, 0.5 science fiction (The collection has both fantasy and SF). 1 is explicitly part of a series, 3 are not, and that question seems inapplicable to the collection.

Books Received, May 24 to May 30

Poll #33185 Books Received, May 24 to May 30

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Midnight on the Celestial by Julia Alexandra (March 2026)
12 (31.6%)

Fate’s Bane by C. L. Clark (September 2025)
9 (23.7%)

These Familiar Walls by C. J. Dotson (April 2026)
5 (13.2%)

Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (January 2026)
17 (44.7%)

Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson (December 2025)
3 (7.9%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
29 (76.3%)

james_davis_nicoll

Would you like to support James Nicoll Reviews? Here are your options!

james_davis_nicoll

Corporal Russell Gary wakes to discover that he is one of a handful of survivors of a biological attack on eastern America... and that there is no place in western America for survivors like Gary.

The Long Loud Silence By Wilson Tucker

spiralsheep

- I accidentally googled kintsugi mouse and found the worst taxidermy shop I've had the misfortune to be tempted to click on.

- Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles is still the best possible title for a book about the Bloomsbury Group, although What Narcissism Means to Me remains my favourite title in any category.

- Devastating book review written in black ballpoint pen inside the front cover of a novel I saw in a charity shop: "I couldn't be bothered finishing this". Also stamped on the same page: "DISCARDED Telford & Wrekin Libraries".

- Nature is odd, but pretty: shell lerps.

oursin

Happy birthday,

sea_changed!

andrewducker

1. What are the effects of congestion pricing in New York City?: (tags:newyork transport )
2. What Democrats sound like trying to appeal to young men right now: (tags:politics USA democrats video satire funny )

used_songs

A meme swiped from

zimena :

Give me one of these in the replies. Then repost so I can do the same for you.

* A music rec (I would LOVE this in particular!)
* A cute message
* Why you follow me
* If we could meet, how would it go?
* Something you want to know about me
* One fact about you

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/doctor-who-series-2-15-41/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61771

Well.

THIS POST HAS SPOILERS FOR TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO

It took me a couple of episodes to warm to this series, not really helped by being away from home for four of the eight Saturdays – and eight really isn’t enough, is it? I quite liked Joy to the World, but was concerned that the peaks of Season 1 / 14 / 40 were rather close to the troughs. On form, RTD is great; but he sometimes lapses into spectacle rather than story and we saw this a couple of times this year.

Something didn’t quite gel for me with the first episode, The Robot Revolution. Partly that the plotline wasn’t all that original, but somehow it felt like actors on a set in a way that even early 60s Who didn’t. I was watching it on a cramped screen in a B&B with ants in the floorcracks, so it may not have been the best circumstances, but it really felt like spectacle was being prioritised, and it was one of the weirder introductions for a new companion even by New Who standards.

Lux was the episode shown at Easter and I watched it with other fans in Belfast. The basic concept of yet another ancient deity emerging – which turns out to be rather easily defeated – didn’t appeal to me, and the acknowledgement of segregation felt a bit by-the-numbers, but I loved the episode’s fanservice, reminiscent of The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who. Everyone’s favourite episode is Blink, right?

I had been warned in advance that The Well would be a good episode, and indeed it was a good birthday present.

Midnight is (still) my favourite Russell T. Davis episode, and I must admit I was delighted when The Well turned out to be a sequel, with a real base-under-siege plot and a really scary monster. We had more mind-blowing stuff to come this season, but this was the scariest episode by far.

And then we had a couple of really unexpected steps. Lucky Day was more Doctor-lite than I think any other episode in New Who. But it gave Ruby a lot of character development, and also made some pungent points about social media and extremism, at a moment when this is all too real. It left a lot of us hoping for more Ruby / Doctor closure.

The Story & the Engine is the second episode of Doctor Who to be almost entirely set in Africa, after “Escape Switch” in 1965.

And OK, Rwanda is not Nigeria, but as I always say, one in six Africans in Nigerian, and we collectively need to be paying more attention to Nigeria. (OK, not you, I know you have been.) The plot is fairly straightforward, with the traditional spider / trickster figure, but I loved what was done with it. We went to a nearby friend’s apartment to watch this one.

The Interstellar Song Contest was shown the same evening as the real Eurovision Song Contest, which was somewhat fraught. An Asian friend thought it was actually a metaphor for Afghanistan (because of the poppies). Some of us thought it was a bit nearer to home, and that the metaphors were a bit mixed, and that racism and prejudice cannot be cured just by singing a sad song in your own language. I didn’t like the Doctor being cruel, though I could see where it came from. But at the same time, I’d prefer that Who address these issues than not. And I was delighted with Carole Ann Ford’s cameo, and the reveal of the Rani at the end. Not to mention…

Watch on YouTube

Last week’s Wish World was a whole load of bonkers exposition, which I generally loved. (Apart from the bloody Bone Beasts, which are testament to RTD’s love of spectacle above substance.) The whole Wandavision vibe of the John Smith / Belinda relationship was beautifully done, as was the sinister control by Conrad of not just his girlfriend but an entire society. (Though one wonders what is happening in countries other than England.) I was left knowing that RTD screws up the season finales more often than not, but hoping against hope that this would not be one of those times.

And, well. The Reality War is the best RTD season finale since The Parting of the Ways. It’s actually two stories. The return of Anita (hooray!) and the defeat of Omega takes up the first 40 minutes, which would be enough for a normal story – we had to explain to F why “It’s good night from me” was such a funny line – and then poor Ruby gets gaslit and minimised by the Doctor…

Until he realises that she is right. And at that point those of us who were unspoilered also realised that this was going to be a very significant episode indeed.

spolier warning

you have been warned

But it was a fantastic decision to soften the impact of Ncuti Gatwa’s impending departure by bringing back Jodie Whittaker, even if only for a couple of minutes, and for us to realise that the Doctor will sacrifice his life to save a child. The final scenes with Belinda were beautifully done. And as for the reveal of the Sixteenth Doctor – I had seen a couple of rumours, but thought it was such a ridiculous idea that I wouldn’t pay any attention. But I’m very glad that I was wrong.

Ranking the stories:

The Well
The Story & the Engine
Wish World / The Reality War
Lucky Day
Lux
The Interstellar Song Contest
The Robot Revolution

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/doctor-who-series-2-15-41/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61771

yhlee

I've been given permission to share this but this was written for an audience of people working for/affiliated with LIGO, so some of these actions won't apply to e.g. general "normal" US citizens.

I will try to make phone calls Monday, but that depends on my being able to speak audibly over the phone (due to medical issues ongoing for ~nine months affecting my voice). I may be limited to emails and handwritten mailed letters. (Good thing I'm not a singer-songwriter?!)

Dear all,
Answering some questions, here are a few more details about US advocacy for science funding:

Please only send emails or visit Congree people if you are a US citizen or permanent resident (so you are talking to people you can vote for), and if you feel comfortable doing so.

You can find actual numbers for funding from different agencies in different states by selecting a state in this link: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/support-federal-science-funding-budget (which provides a template letter too), or using data provided here: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/dashboards

We have been collecting companies and institutions where graduate students and postdocs trained in LIGO with NSF funding have gone in here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13yMrZ9HdmjtDTxS7hr7quwGEX-j4Ri0TVjMk0hJmxms/edit?usp=sharing (the diversity of companies is a very effective message for Congress people)

You can find flyers with data about specific issues APS [American Physical Society] advocates for in Congressional Day Visits held in January; these can be used year-long, of course: https://cvd.aps.org/

Nothing beats a face-to-face conversation; meeting with your Senators’ and Representative’s offices is one of the most impactful actions you can take.
[This part is probably addressed to e.g. university faculty and so on rather than regular people.]

(In joke mode, as a Cornell alum, I preferred the less clown show timeline when my jokey aggro rivalry feelings toward Harvard were "catchy well-respected Latin motto Ivy League p*nis envy" rather than rooting for Harvard. Sorry, Harvard folks!)

[adapted from cross-post to Tumblr]
I'm over a year late on CROWNWORLD. My agent and editor are aware. The book is not likely to get done soon despite my being under 10,000 words / 3 chapters from the finish line, because I'm too stressed and exhausted to soldier on.

The parts that I haven't discussed much if at all in public:

- My health cratered a few years ago. I wrote most of STARSTRIKE in all lowercase while seeking ways I could write flat on my back in bed without making the pain worse. I spent a year bedridden, getting 0-4 hours of sleep per night (not a typo); I only left the house for doctor's appointments or to vote.

- This included uncommon bad med reactions like the one that sent me to the ER with internal bleeding. I'm cautious about new-to-me meds for a reason.

- I was making good progress writing early in 2025 but then I had a concussion. I'm mostly recovered but my balance is still not 100%.

- A family member had multiple health crises that could have killed them.

- South Korea's president attempted an insurrection (a common interpretation) by declaring martial law in December 2024. Almost all my family is in South Korea. I couldn't even discuss it publicly because there was a nonzero chance that it would endanger my relatives. (I've been to a literature festival in Seoul under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Sport. They know I exist, and South Korea has a history of dictatorships, censorship, and brutal putdowns of protests.)

- I learned my father had a cerebral hemorrhage that same month. He's in South Korea. I'm in the USA. The unstable political situation in South Korea would have made any attempt to visit him unusually fraught.

- The Trump presidency. Unfortunately, chronic health problems curtail the kinds and amounts of activism I can physically do even before we get to being burned out.

- My husband works at LIGO, which won a Nobel Prize for the detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. President Trump's proposed budget would (among many other things) cut funding for one of two LIGO sites, at which point why not defund both. (NSF budget news [science.org] but the link may be paywalled.) You need two gravitational wave observatories to verify a detection (triangulation/noise reduction).

What about other observatories internationally, you ask? There are two: VIRGO (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan). LIGO can detect out to ~150 megaparsecs, VIRGO to ~80 megaparsecs (best case), KAGRA to ~10 megaparsecs (best case). But space is volumetric, so for a comparison you need to cube these numbers.

LIGO's at ~3 million (let's call that 100% as a measuring stick). VIRGO's at ~500,000 (~20%). KAGRA is at ~1,000 (under 1% - worse by a couple orders of magnitude, in fact). These are estimates, but I've estimated conservatively.

Pictorially:

LIGO    **********
VIRGO   **
KAGRA   .

- This is a proposed US budget, not an approved one as of this writing, but if LIGO doesn't get cut, it's because something even more essential than basic research in astronomy/physics is axed (further).

- I am selfishly stressed about the possibility that my husband will lose his job. I'm on his health insurance, and did we mention my health? This has career implications for me as well if I become the primary breadwinner. If we knew for certain one way or the other, we could plan; but the uncertainty is wreaking havoc for pretty much everyone.

- I've had my books challenged and pulled from libraries for "DEI" reasons (Tiger Honor seems to be the usual "problem" due to the nonbinary protagonist; I don't think Phoenix Extravagant sold well enough to attract similar attention).

- A studio optioned Dragon Pearl but was stymied first by the Hollywood strikes (solidarity to the unions!) and then opted not to negotiate for another renewal because when shopping it around, the feedback was that a Korean space opera was too "DEI" to be a good investment in this political environment. (Whatever one's feelings about this, this is absolutely true in a business/economic sense.) So this makes career planning additionally selfishly fraught. Too bad I didn't go all in on het shifter romance? I started writing one! - het shifter romance is my favorite kind - and I loved it but somebody had a book contract to attend to.

- I am sad for the US wrecking ball clown show and I am sad for everyone everywhere who is affected by the US wrecking ball clown show. ("Lying low" politically is a lost cause when one is a semi-public figure.) I am, perhaps controversially, of the opinion that the despot playbook of North Korea and past South Korean dictatorships ought to be assiduously avoided, not enshrined as some asshole US administration's hashtag life goals. But I'm just a science fiction writer, not a politician, so what do I know.

Any impact to me is unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. My job is producing entertainment fiction and it's by definition nonessential. My household will lurch along; I'm not in financial distress. But I am selfishly stressed out of my mind and likely to spend June 2025 writing bad music, badly playing 16-bit videogames, badly designing/coding a visual novel and/or graphic novel only half a dozen friends will ever see. Maybe I will scribble at the het shifter romance without any intention of writing well, but rather stress relief, and continue moseying toward music composition/orchestration. Under better circumstances, this would make a nice mini-vacation; but these are not better circumstances.

My failings as a writer and human being are well known at this point; but if the book isn't delivered in June, that's why. It's not much of an apologia. Y'all stay safe and take care of yourselves and each other out there.

Note: I had planned to just delete this journal as having served its function but here we are.

silveradept

Let us begin with the people who will set you up with a sign with the phrase "In our America: All people are Equal; Love Wins; Black Lives Matter; Immigrants & Refugees are Welcome; Disabilities are Respected; Women are in Charge of their Bodies; People & Planet are Valued over Profits; Diversity is Celebrated." Or stickers. Or other such expressions of the phrase.

There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.

One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.

What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.

A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.

Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.

A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.

(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)

Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.

( Still more to be seen inside, including the usual parade of US politics behaving badly )

Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.

Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now

andrewducker

I occasionally see people complaining that Edinburgh Council hate cars. And, to be fair, I suspect that some of the council members do dislike them (The Green Party are not known for being big car fans). But the Green Party don't run the council (it's currently Labour supported by the Tories and Lib Dems - but their policies about cars vs buses are very similar to the SNP administration), so why is it that people think the council as a whole hate cars?

It's because the council has very little choice.

In a very rural area cars make total economic sense and buses make very little. There aren't enough people travelling between any two points at a given time to make it worth running buses that often, so buses either don't exist, or only connect larger areas rarely. And because they don't run that often, you can't just wander out and leap on to one to get where you need to. So you pretty much *have* to have a car.

Once you more urban you have a situation where buses are running regularly on key routes, so if you live on them then you'll be able to rely on a bus to get too/from work/school. And if you're doing that enough that you're paying for a bus pass, or that you're able to get to most of the places you want then a chunk of people don't need cars any more.

And then, as you get even more urban, you reach a key point where there are *lots* of buses. And to manage the concentration of people in the city you run out of space on the roads, at least at key parts of the day. You now have traffic jams at rush hour. And that's because you have vehicles that are 4.5m long that are carrying one person and other vehicles that are three times that length that are carrying 100 people. If you want to keep those 100 people moving then one of the most efficient ways of doing it is to get the incredibly wasteful vehicles carrying only 1 person out of the way.

Now, this is problematic. If you do it before you have decent bus routes set up for people to switch to then there will be a lot of resistance. You clearly need to hit a critical point to make it doable. And obviously you need some exceptions. But *something* like it is inevitable as people get more concentrated together. You simply cannot fit everyone in the roads if they are using cars, you need something more compact than that.

andrewducker

It Has Begun...
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

hunningham

Today has turned into another day spent wrestling with servers, and security reviews, and pushing code live and installing patches. Among other things, I am trying to work out what 'TCP/IP Predictable ISN (Initial Sequence Number) Generation Weakness' means and how I can fix it. And why are all the most recent bot attacks originating from Brazil?
I am being very flaky and procrastinating about a lot of things. Mostly Green Party responsibilities. I am meant to be writing a Green party email newsletter and I really do not want to do this for reasons I cannot fathom. I have been procrastinating about this all day (all week) and I am not sure why so very much reluctant. TCP/IP Predictable ISN vulnerability? I need to put this job down and see if someone else can pick it up. I also have about 8 hours of newsletter deliveries to do next week and am very meh about that. So much cannot do, and I am being flattened by whatsapp messages.
Good things have happened, are happening. Himself is away, so I am cooking. Lentil & sweet potato soup and I am roasting vegetables for tonight and also for lunches later in the week. There's asparagus with tomatoes, and broad bean pods ('tis the season), and some young beetroot with lashings of balsamic vinegar. There's some rhubarb (probably the last I'll see this year) which I have stewed with ginger and will eat with greek yoghurt. And a glass or two of some very nice wine.

cosmolinguist

I did my split squats today and didn't hate them!

Split squats always get a groan when our trainer tells us to do them, no one likes them, but I've found them a particular trial during ankle recovery. They've so good for me that lunges (which are similar) were a formal part of my physiotherapy. But that also meant they were hard, no fun, and not terribly rewarding!

I've always been fortunate that my recovery hasn't featured a lot of pain, but that almost made it more difficult to monitor, and cope with, the intense weakness in that ankle (and the knock-on effects, like my already-atrocious balance somehow got (and remains) even worse?!).

Feeling okay until my leg just didn't hold me up properly can be unsettling!

I've patiently stuck with it, doing regular bodyweight lunges in circuits when other people are doing walking lunges with the biggest dumbbells available to us there (not very big, but still!) and having to tuck myself into the squat cage for split squats at lift club so I could hang on to the bars to keep my balance.

And now I can do (very slow, increasingly wobbly) walking lunges, and I can do split squats without hanging on to anything -- except a little kettlebell! And I might have to go up to the second-smallest size of kettlebell next time actually, I was thinking today.

It's nice to feel like I'm at about the level where I would have been starting if I hadn't broken my ankle almost immediately into taking up exercise as a hobby. I mean yes it'd be nice if it hadn't taken me a year and a half to get that far, but as with so many of the other changes in my body in the past year and a half, I try not to get caught up in what-ifs and wistful regret, and I think I am doing okay at that.

oursin

Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/05/31/final-adieux/

james_davis_nicoll

22 works reviewed. 12 by women (55%), 9 by men (41%), 0 by non-binary authors (0%), 1 by authors whose gender is unknown (5%), and 9 by POC (41%)... and I really need to redo how I track incoming books.

More details here.

Books received will be tonight. Long shift I have to get to.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/may-2025-books/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61691

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31)
Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)

Non-genre 2 (YTD 19)
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

SF 13 (YTD 57)
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13)
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 4 (YTD 16)
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

7,200 pages (YTD 35,300)
13/31 (YTD 52/138) by non-male writers (van der Lint, Blum, Ypi, West, Bradley, Cole, Donnelly, Jacobs x2, Kaner, Engle, Huang, Ferris)
3/31 (YTD 21/138) by non-white writers (Bradley, Cole, Huang)
2/31 rereads (Beyond the Sun, Doctor Who: Logopolis)

231 books currently tagged unread, down 20 from last month, down 78 from May 2024.

Reading now
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Coming soon (perhaps)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Final Cut, by Charles Burns
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/may-2025-books/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61691

nanila

Watch on YouTube

Vienna => home => Cambridge => home => Hamburg => home => Norfolk => home

Not a lot of Humuhumu as she's been away for substantial portions of this month. We'd all like a little rest from travel, I think, but it's not happening until mid-June.

oursin

Happy birthday,

wonderlandkat!

skygiants

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

( we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugo-best-novelette/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61511

I felt that two of these were less good than the other four, but otherwise I found it difficult to rank them. However, you gotta start somewhere.

(Titles link to original publications where available.)

6) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha. Second paragraph of third section:

We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.

Books and technology and perceptions and truth. Didn’t quite have the emotional punch that I wanted.

5) “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third section:

There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.

Quite short; wizard and her apprentice awkwardly build a relationship and fight evil.

4) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Second paragraph of third section:

Antonis could not believe it. In fact, he had probably stopped listening to her rant right about when his werewolf neighbor had sent him a new wallpaper pattern. A thank you gift for watering the roses outside the werewolf’s castle. Antonis said that he’d prefer to be paid in teeth, the currency of TinyCastle, but as he had explained to Nefeli, you have to roll with the game, that’s half the fun.

Splendidly creepy story of the protagonist (and eventually others) becoming gradually cut off from the rest of humanity, in parallel timetracks, with good sense of place.

3) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie. (Title story of a collection which you can get here.) Second paragraph of third section:

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially
for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village.
And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter
Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years
wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark.
That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’
mothers had said. “What if ?” the mothers whispered. A good person,
who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village,
but peculiar. “What if ? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What
if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

This was the first of the novelettes that I read, and I was sure I was going to vote for it, so am slightly surprised to find myself putting it only third. Very well drawn story of a rather merciless alien society, whose first contact with humans brings change, but perhaps not enough.

2) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker. Second paragraph of third section:

“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”

Tremendous tale which starts off looking like it’s just a matter of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters finding some common landing point after decades of estrangement, and then turns into something completely different. Loses a quarter of a point for last four paras, which are an unnecessary epilogue.

1) “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. Second paragraph of third section:

I looked at the lease again and noticed something else: it was the simplest lease I’d signed since that sublet agreement in college that we’d made because everyone’s parents said we needed to “get things in writing.” Leases are usually full of rules and caveats—how to give notice at the end of term, how much you’ll owe if you damage something, whether you’re allowed to have a pet. This lease just said it ran from September through June, how much we were paying per month, and that we’d be paying utilities. The lead-based paint disclosure and the move-in checklist were paperclipped to the back.

Tremendous story of selkies, feminism, toxic relationships and the academic research treadmill. Charming and righteously enraging, with strong sense of the Massachusetts coast. Gets my vote.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugo-best-novelette/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61511

kaberett

Yesterday, on the drive, we found the greater part of a small light blue eggshell. (Dunnock? Starling?)

We have also, with the rain, been seeing (and relocating) lots of gastropods, so I suggested we move the eggshell into gastropod territory.

Checked back this morning, and while the blue is mostly intact the inside surface has been very clearly significantly monched. V v pleased to have provided delicious snack and also by CREATURES in general :-)

telophase

Sorry for no other real update but I have just been "bleh" at the thought of sitting down and typing when I have other things to do. Oops.

ANYWAY. I did seven pictures for the May the 4th Star Wars fanworks exchange! And I received 3 stories!

( WHAT I GOT: )

The seven pictures I did, in no particular order:

Stolen Moment (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order Series (Video Games), Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cal Kestis/Merrin the Nightsister
Characters: Cal Kestis, Merrin the Nightsister (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

It will have to be enough

Irresistable Force Meets a Movable Object (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Leia Organa
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

I know that feel, Obi-Wan.

Target Practice (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: CT-9904 | Crosshair & Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Characters: CT-9904 | Crosshair, Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Additional Tags: Fanart, Treat
Summary:

A little practice never hurt anyone. Well maybe not *anyone*...

Guardian (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jocasta Nu
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

She would guard it with her life...and did.

Formal Portrait (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

What would young Leia choose for her first senatorial portrait?

A Fistful of Credits (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character
Characters: Original Sith, Original Jedi
Additional Tags: love them western vibes, Space Cowboys - Freeform, Fanart, Treat
Summary:

It's the first holodrama of its kind! It won't be the last!

Dark Seduction (39 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Corran Horn/Exar Kun
Characters: Corran Horn, Exar Kun
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

Prompt: "That scene where he appears to Corran at night but sexy"

rachelmanija

In a magical version of the medieval Middle East, a middle-aged single mom, who was once the notorious pirate Amina al-Sirafi, is dragged out of retirement for one final job.

This book is a complete and utter delight from start to finish. It has all the pirate tropes you could possibly want - sea battles! sea monsters! quests for magical objects! loyal crews! tossed overboard! marooned! - and sly twists on others. It's got great characters. It's got hilarious dialogue and character interactions. The world is wonderfully detailed and varied, full of plausible historical details and with a lovely faux-historical feel. There are stories within stories. It's all marvelous.

As a child, I had a book called Muslim Saints and Mystics, which was a translation of parts of the Tazkirat al-Awliyā, a collection of stories about Muslim saints written around 1200. It was funny and magical, and some of the stories-within-stories in Amina al-Sirafi have a similar feel. The novel neatly toes the line between dialogue that feels fairly contemporary and a plausibly historical mindset. Amina is horny as hell, but a serious Muslim who believes in not having sex before marriage; as a result, she's had five husbands. There's a major trans character, in addition to several gay characters; Amina has come across people before who prefer to live as the other sex, and takes it in stride without resorting to Tumblr-esque labels or attitudes.

I loved every moment of this book, and was delighted that though it has a reasonable ending, it is the start of a trilogy. It's the first book I've read by Chakraborty, and I'm excited to read her City of Brass series.

( Read more... )

chickenfeet

https://bachtrack.com/22/296/view/28846

oursin

Welsh farmer pleads guilty to stealing more than 70 sheep from neighbour.

The term 'rustled' is invoked: 'At least 73 ewes in lamb were rustled in March'.

Alas, this does not sound at all like the Old West of the movies of my youth:

[He] told the court he had acted because of financial pressure but understood his actions were “unacceptable”, BBC Wales reported. Williams added that he “deeply” regretted stealing the sheep and “feels ashamed”.

This is downright weird, though, coming over as somewhere between performance art and participant observation??? Or maybe more like anthropologists who 'go native' if they spend too long in the field, this is a sad warning of what happens to criminology lecturers?

Woman who calls herself ‘UK’s poshest thief’ fined for stealing Le Creuset cookware:

A former criminology lecturer who calls herself the “UK’s poshest thief” has been fined for stealing more than £1,000-worth of Le Creuset cookware, steaks, wine and gin.
Pauline Al Said and her husband, Mark Wheatcroft, have been fined £2,500 between them after the thefts from a garden centre and a branch of Marks & Spencer.
....
Representing themselves, the couple, from Southsea in Hampshire, told Portsmouth crown court their actions were on the “lower end”.

Personally, I think 'stealing your Le Creuset cookware' is in the same area of tackiness as, what was it, 'people who bought their furniture', or was it silverware?

I also think it is tacky to call yourself 'UK's poshest thief' and a pretty sure sign that you are a very long way from being the C21st equivalent of Raffles the Amateur Cracksman.