child_of_the_air

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

kaberett

On Tuesday, I picked a kohlrabi. The stem itself got eaten at the plot; the leaves I brought home to cook and eat subsequently rather than compost them. I stuck them in a glass of water to keep them going while I work out what exactly it is I want to do, and -- they are stunning. I am enjoying them so much every time I go past them: dark blue-tinged green leaves, pink-purple stems and veins (the cultivar is Azur; I do not currently have photos but will attempt to get my act together tomorrow.)
I have four spikes of ginger, one thoroughly unfurled into leaves, and at least one more thinking hard about it. I do not expect to wind up self-sufficient in ginger but I am very much enjoying the experiment.
a word you've never understood (Prophet, 9k words). I did not read it all in one gulp -- I paused to take notes -- and I'm now on my second read through, which could in theory be more of a gulp but mysteriously I seem to be taking more notes and also remembering that I wanted to shake the internet for more information about the experience termed "aftersensations", for Book Purposes. (Also I think I've lured another person into at least starting the book...)
Asparagus for lunch! Still in season; still delicious.
My house once again contains Large Quantities of hazelnuts and pecans. I Monch.

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

duskpeterson

The royal sactuary is arguably the most important chamber in the palace. It is here that, in former times, a sanctuarian priest held daily rituals designed to uplift the spirits of worshippers and – I am sorry to say – crush the spirits of slaves. The Emorians, rightly appalled by the Koretians' treatment of their slaves, built part of their new palace over the burning ground just outside the courtyard, which lay within easy sight of the sanctuary.

Despite its despicable misdeeds of the past, Koretia's priesthood has survived to the present day. The Jackal, who is also High Priest of Koretia, holds annual services to honor the slaves who served and died in Koretia; these services are often attended by the few slaves who survived their treatment. Some of these slaves remain dead in mind but come willingly to this service, drawn here by the Jackal, who is the god of death and who therefore watches over their spirits in the Land Beyond. To witness these dead-in-mind men and women gather around the Jackal is a deeply moving experience - a living monument to the Koretian belief that the gods can transform evil into good.

The royal sanctuary was desecrated at the time of the Emorian invasion of 961; the sanctuary was used to stable horses in the years that followed. After the Emorians withdrew from Koretia in 976, the chamber remained empty for many years. In 987, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Koretia's slaves by the Emorians, the chamber was rededicated under the name of the Royal Sanctuary of the Living Dead. It is now a memorial to the suffering of Koretia's former slaves.

Conveniently for visitors, the royal sanctuary can be visited separately from the rest of the palace. The sanctuary now has its own entrance, unconnected to the royal residence or any other portion of the Koretian palace.

[Translator's note: The Royal Sanctuary plays a dramatic role in Death Mask.]

kaberett

Picture me: sat on the sofa, opposite the French doors, vaguely paying attention to what was going on at the bird feeder, mildly amused by the extremely ungainly magpie.

The magpie that inspected the water bowl (that someone had thrown off its stand) and the feeder (that was empty) and the me (on the sofa) and Came To A Decision.

It did a tiny hop-skip-flap over and landed, very deliberately, on the workbench just the other side of the glass. It turned its head from side to side to get a good look at me from both eyes.

And then, having glared at me, it started yelling.

And kept yelling until I was up off the sofa and clearly heading for the door, whereupon it retreated to a safe distance, i.e. the garage rooves, and Continued Observing.

I sorted out the water dish. I got the crates of Misc Birdseed out of their cupboard. I sorted out the feeder. I sorted out the other feeder.

I went back inside.

Some time elapsed.

Eventually I got sufficiently puzzled about why the magpie hadn't come back yet to actually notice that I'd left the crates of seed out, and their cupboard door open.

I heaved myself back off the sofa.

I returned the seeds to their cupboard, and shut the cupboard's door. I returned myself to the sofa, shutting the patio door behind me.

Not terribly long after that, the magpie returned, and drank, and nibbled suspiciously (I had changed which food was in which feeder position), and appeared satisfied at least to the extent of not yelling any further...

... right up until the squirrel showed up to claim a portion of the restock.

I am absolutely delighted to have made this neighbour's acquaintance.

sovay

I just had my hand dipped in paraffin for a therapeutic procedure and it was so cool. After four immersions in the bracingly hot, clear, slightly soft liquid which reminded me of candle-making in elementary school, it formed a dully livid, slowly malleable coating in which I could see instantly the possibilities of practical effects, although what I actually said as I carefully brought my mannequin hand over to the table where it would be wrapped in plastic and insulated with a towel was, "It's fascinating. I must be quite flammable." The heat lingered much longer in the paraffin than I had expected from the quick-hardening dots and puddles of candlewax and cooled to room temperature without brittling. It had to be rubbed through to be removed. Tragically it did not peel off like a glove into an inverted ghost hand, but it could actually be worked off my wrist and fingers in a coherent thick wrinkle and took none of the small hairs off the back of my hand with it, like its own Vaseline layer. "Your skin is going to be so moisturized," the therapist promised me. I am still getting a referral to a hand specialist, but it was such a neat experience and like nothing I have experienced at a doctor's. It did not trip my sensory wires and made me think of Colin Clive in Mad Love (1935).

Current Music: Jade Bird, "Dreams"

sovay

It improves my mood considerably that I can listen to the Drive's "Jerkin'" (1977) because not only is the song itself a brilliant example of stupid rock, the band existed for a grand total of seven months during which it managed to release one un-radio-playable single, manufacture a scandal, blow an important gig, and implode in a puff of 20/20 hindsight, which sounds like a none more punk biography to me. Any myriad of such one-not-exactly-hit wonders would have bubbled through any scene with a critical exposure to Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols—in this case it was Dundee's—but this one left enough traces that I can, thanks to one of the better functions of the internet, experience all six and a half minutes of their total musical record and read for myself their history according to their lead singer, who really should feel proud that so much pleasure can be transferred through a song about masturbation. It has a two-guitar solo! DIY that slide! The persistence of thrown-at-the-wall weirdness makes me feel better about the world. On that note, because I had recent occasion to, as it were, drag it out, Lou Rand Hogan's The Gay Cookbook (1965).

Current Music: The Drive, "Jerkin'"

sovay

All praise to the makers of Bar Keepers Friend, which enabled me and

rushthatspeaks to de-blue the shower tonight after he had re-dyed his hair. It took us four tries to find a restaurant that wasn't dark Mondays, but eventually El Vaquero came through with, in my case, a spectacularly stuffed burrito de lengua which did its best to be bigger than my head. I am not at the top of my health and feeling more than a little disintegrated about current events. Have a picture from a window of MIT.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Bloom Baby Bloom"

sorcyress

It's extra help in the library time!

After the first half of the year, I got rather into the habit of expecting 0-1 students, usually on the low end of that range. But then I've had a few weeks in a row of the pre-calc teachers sending me students to make up tests and things, or do body doubling, and suddenly this week I have _three kids_ hanging out with me. Two are doing tests (one mine, one a pre-calc kid) and the third is finishing up work with me semi-helpfully remembering how limits work.

(I have not yet cynically said "I suppose you can see how often this gets used in the real world" but it's coming)

We're very much at the end of the year, and things are pretty self-paced, which means sometimes in class I can even grade a test or two. Which is good, because the major work task I have right now is, uh, grade all the tests. And everything else that is outstanding. And shake my head and sigh at the students who are obviously using AI, badly. (I miss when they were using photomath badly, at least that wasn't --as I saw someone describe genAI today-- "smarmy").

I had a fourth student arrive! I briefly had FOUR STUDENTS at once which is an absolute record for library help! This was another one of my kiddos even, and I was able to help him grasp the trig stuff he managed to miss entirely, and then throw the test at him to finish up. It will be much more successful than the two days he spent staring at it in a panic because he didn't know any trig.

***

In my real life, I have begun playing Stardew Valley (edit: no spoilers please), and decided it is the Bee's Knees. This shocks basically no one who has ever met me. Am I able to moderate my playing? I will be! But, uh, not quite yet. I need to calm down about it a little bit, or get _really_ strict about playing a day at a time and pausing in between each day to go accomplish real life tasks. (To be clear, I started it on Saturday, and finished the first day of fall yesterday, so we are moving along real nice. But also I did like eighteen hours in two days so UH.)

I'm also doing my reading (I have two days before my check-out pops for Drop of Corruption and I'm only about two thirds done), and getting ready for LCFD weekend quite soon (where hopefully I will not have an infinite amount of grading to do, although I am apparently going direct from work to my ride's house to camp. So I'm packing whatever I haven't already graded! (note to self: This means you'll be packing the work laptop, and shouldn't need to also bring your personal one).

Tonight is the high school graduation, and I've kinda just decided to go direct from school to there. This might be annoying in terms of baggage, but I think it will ultimately be fine. Worst case scenario, someone steals my work bag and I am very sad oh no.

The hardest part about Stardew Valley is that right now it feels _happy_ in a way that means I should probably talk to my therapist. Because Saturday was not otherwise particularly happy, and Sunday was better but also not exactly joyful and HM. What exactly am I looking for here? Control? Simple well definied tasks? An extremely imposed bedtime that I can't avoid no matter what? A morning routine that can always be the same followed by a variety of pleasant ways to spend the afternoon and evening?

(Sunday was good because I was helping LB move, and community is good. It's nice to get to pretend to be butch sometimes, and there was a lot of walking back and forth between old and new houses in pleasant weather. But it was also a lot of social-with-people-I-don't-know which can be fun or can be hard, and LB being extremely efficient which was actually great but then meant everything was done in like...three hours including the eating lunch at the end part. And back into my own head we go!)

***

The real answer is I'm looking for "not being burnt out" and video games can feel like that, kinda sorta sometimes. It is unfortunate that the only real cure for burnout is "rest, prolonged" and I don't get access to that until mid-July. And then I need to figure out the rest of my plans, like when I'm going to Maryland and the like. Sigh.

okay, I think I have figured that out, and also I think I'll be in town for about two weeks, assuming the timing works for my mom. Which means I should definitely _actually see people_ in MD, and also like, I dunno, go to a bells practice? Note to self, send some emails closer to. But as always, it's primarily a chance to hang out with my Cool Mom.

And then I'll have queer Scottish on the 7th, and then two full weeks of very little planned¹, and then into the school year! Huzzah!

***

We keep going. Tonight there might be ice cream. I do like that part.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I uh. god willing and the creek don't rise, it's very little planned, but that little is a _lot_.

siderea

2025 May 16: The Washington Examiner: "An American papacy: The Catholic Church didn’t choose Pope Leo XIV to battle Trump"

2025 May 30: AlterNet: "'Divine trolling': Pope schedules Chicago mass on the same day as Trump's military parade"

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... )

sovay

City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose ⁶⁰Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

( It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

Current Music: Oppenheimer Analysis, "Security Risk"

sovay

A nice thing to link to: Jeannelle M. Ferreira's "The House of Women" (2025), named after the site on Akrotiri because it is a story from when the mountain was Minoan and the walls of the city where libations were offered 𐀤𐀨𐀯𐀊 𐂕𐄽𐄇 were painted with dolphins and saffron gatherers. I have a great affection for this story with its ground pigments and grilled eel and lovers describable as sapphic a thousand years before the tenth Muse. Even in cataclysms, it is worth holding on.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Big Deal"

siderea

Back in 2013, I winnowed down the entire listings of Boston Early Music Festival events, official and fringe, to a curated concentrate of just concerts and other events featuring music from before 1600 AD. There were about 35 of them.

The 2025 BEMF is just nine days out and the Fringe Concerts listings updated today has a total of fewer than 30 listings.

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 :-)

sovay

I helped cook for eight people tonight, since in a sort of semi-impromptu reunion, both of my mother's siblings were in town with their respective partners and the child of one of them, whose own child is graduating from college this weekend because time isn't even an illusion. My major contributions were sautéing a sort of smoky mélange of rainbow carrots and peppers and shallots and handling the pan-frying of the chicken breasts my father was dredging for the piccata while not scalding more than three of my fingertips on the steamed zucchini with dill. My mother's marmalade cake was enjoyed by all. I am now home in a somewhat deliquescent state, since I had two telehealth appointments before even leaving the house, but this total of people had not been in the same place since pre-pandemic and it was important to be one of them. I can't wait for this pollen season to be over. It turns out if you dunk a chunk of brie into homemade pesto, it's a brilliant idea.

Current Music: Sunflower Bean, "Champagne Taste"

sorcyress

It's not Wednesday, which means it's a day of the week eligible for Wednesday Books. (I don't know why I'm so contrary about this, and I know occasionally I've messed up anyways). It's been a while, let's catch up!

Finished Reading Recently

We left off with me just barely having started Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters. I got through it, but am continuing to feel Pretty Weird about the fact that I don't love the Witches stories nearly as much as I love the Guard stories. I did like all the Scottish-play references, because I am a theatre nerd (even if I'm not that kind of theatre nerd).

I then did a very necessary and very burnt-out reread of all seven Murderbot (by Martha Wells) books in rapid succession. They continue to be Real Fucking Good, and I continue to enjoy having

verdantry to samebrain at and send random screencaps or whatever when I need. Three is still my absolute favourite golden retriever puppy of a character, but I had an unexpectedly positive reaction to 2.0 this time around. The seventh book is still the hardest to read, due to [redacted] but I still love the ending so goddamn much and all the hope for the future it seems to provide. Man these books are good for me.

After I finished Murderbot, I returned to the Disc with the next guards book: Jingo! This uh. This is a book about colonialism and racism and war and UH. Like. UHHHH.

Look, all of Pratchett's stuff has this horrible timeless quality to it --I say horrible, because it's less like "applicable to humans everywhere" and more like "goddamnit, we _still_ have to protest this shit?". And reading a book which is very blatantly drawing some parallels between us, the upstanding white British folk with our stiff upper lips and sensible demeanor, and them, the brown-skinned desert-living barbarians with their foreign ways and horrible traditions......yeeeeah, we still have to protest this shit?

It is nice as hell to watch Vimes annoyedly realize he's being racist and have to figure out how to be Less So. It's _amazing_ to watch him wield his privilege like a weapon, as extensively as humanly possible. The only reason to have power is to help those who don't have it, and Vimes gets that.

I was unexpectedly okay with the haha-very-funny joke of Nobby-the-horrible-gremlin being put into a dress and getting in touch with his feminine side. Like. I mean, there were some parts of it that were transphobe-adjacent, but most of the humour was very solidly on "Nobby Nobbs is a horrible gremlin" and not "men wearing dresses is inherently funny". And honestly, even with the first part, it felt pretty okay to watch him be like "no, it was genuinely good for me to explore my gender by doing some of this"

I've done at least one babysitting of The Local Toddler, so we read a small handful of books --not nearly as many as last time, because we spent most of the day outside at the playgrounds instead. But we got through a few:

Hooray, a pinata! by Elisa Kleven felt _ridiculously_ familiar to me as the kind of neurospice who builds connections with toys and plushies and fictional objects. Very sweet little story!

Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall I have maybe read before? Not sure. It's a trans allegory and it doesn't try to be subtle about it. Reading parts of it really hurts because dannnnngg yeah, it is hard when other people see you in a way that just isn't true.

The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchins was entirely forgettable. There's counting. There's a nice cast of multi-racial inoffensive children. There are cookies. Great literature, it is not, but it won't hurt anyone.

Bootsie Barker Bites by Barbara Bottner I read after the toddler was in bed, just finding it on the floor and giving it a shot. And it was _delightful_! It includes a child being belived by their parents about something they find uncomfortable! It includes the triumph of brains over brawn! It includes girl children who are horrible little gremlin bullies! (I mean, obviously we don't like bullies, but dang, it's weirdly refreshing to see visions of bullying that look familiar to my childhood and ALSO let girls be rough and physical and scary sometimes!). It was a fun read and I didn't predict the twist and was pleased when I got to it!

Last thing I've finished reading recently was the entire archive of the webcomic Subnormality. If you've been around the internet for a while, it's the one with too many words and the immortal human-eating Sphinx as a regular character. I'd read batches of it before, but not in ages and ages, and it was nice to see how all the threads warp and weft. It's absolutely pretentious as shit, but still made me cry at least a couple times, and wrapped me up in a general hope for humanity --even when it's being cynical as fuck, it never seems to stop hoping. (The lead singer of the Generals is my favourite character, by far).

Oh, and I don't think I ever properly mentioned it, but I had been reading The Pushcart War aloud to Austin, and did finally finish it. And then quite soon after, observed one of my favourite students holding her own very beloved copy and we had a mutual squee.....and then I learned that apparently subsequent editions have changed the dates of the book to place it "in the future" which makes absolutely zero goddamn sense given that _nothing else is changed_. So her copy, published in like 2014 or so, sets the pushcart war as beginning in 2026 but does not otherwise _remotely_ reimagine a world that is different from the one in my much older copy, which sets the tale in the 1980s.

Currently Reading

I have been a mess with library check-outs and holds and stuff. I have two physical books I really need to return to the library, like, months ago because I'm probably not going to read them at this point, and I have two digital books that I need to re-hold because I didn't manage to get to them when they were checked out to me. Arg!

What I am actually currently reading though is A Drop of Corruption, which is Robert Jackson Bennett's sequel to his excellent The Tainted Cup which I read last year. I'm through the first part and definitely having as much joy about the worldbuilding and any moment Ana is on screen. Din is...going through it, and I hope he works himself out okay. I like that I've observed at least one of the Clues that was later confirmed, although I wasn't nearly smart enough to answer the first mystery that was presented. Anyways, I have like five days before that ebook evaporates, but I think I'm on track. Finding excuses to walk places and read as I do seems to be really helpful for how my brain handles books.

A couple weeks ago, I needed something to read as I walked to (actual in-person!) therapy, so I broke out my Gutenberg ebook of Dracula, and read up to the current day. I think my hope is to actually go ahead and read the whole thing _not_ as a daily, since I haven't managed that either of the previous two years I've been subscribed. But I haven't read anything since, so I'm behind either way. I did get far enough to get to the part where Jonathan is looking out the window and being all "that sure is my host climbing around on the outside of the castle like a big lizard". Delightful!

What I'm Reading Next

More Discworld, probably. I'm currently at a slight loss for specific cravings, although Tho read Scholomance on my recommendation, so maybe I grab that again. I could for reals try Fire Logic (third time's the charm?) or try to get and finish How To Be Perfec.

I should have some free time in mid-to-late August and I'd love to spend some of that doing like...a thorough read-through of the stuff on my bookshelves I've never gotten to. I also had something push the "Transmet?" button in the back of my brain and like ugh, we all know Warren Ellis is a creep and the books have some serious problems, but also I think I was rereading the entire series more often than once a year during the first Tr*mp administation and I'm probably due for more of that.

Yaybooks!

~Sor
MOOP!

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.

sovay

Actually, despite the amount of vacuuming and dusting it contained, I had a rather nice day. I walked into Cambridge to pick up my copies of Sian Northey and Ness Owen's Afonydd (2025) and Vin Packer's The Girl on the Best Seller List (1960) and a present for my niece, based on Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris' The Lost Words (2017). Thanks to a sale, I was able to present

spatch with a DVD of Get Crazy (1983) and my mother gave me Poker Faces (1926), otherwise known as the recently restored silent feature starring Edward Everett Horton which has intrigued me for the last month. She thinks I should learn to read Welsh. I had an oat scone in between errands.

selkie approved my introduction to Calbee's seaweed-and-salt potato chips. The mail brought the disaster-themed special volume of The Massachusetts Historical Review which contains the chapter on the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake from Donald Fleming's never-finished history of science edited by Dean Grodzins. I cleaned a lot. Mostly it's been weeks since I walked anywhere and was not dead flat afterward, wiped out from doing one thing in a day. The alternative was nice.

Current Music: Oneida, "History's Great Navigators"

sorcyress

Returning to the real world has been rough.

I think part of it is that I didn't sleep well --the whole previous week, I managed to actually get out of bed on the first alarm without hitting snooze multiple times. Today....I did not manage that. Part of the problem is waking up and it being _cold_ and part is just being tired and cranky. But I definitely spent _way_ longer in bed than I should've today.

I did make it to work, and then it took over half an hour to get my 40 copies finished, which like...fucking hell, I wish I worked for a school that had sufficient materials, etc. For all that I'm part of my union's bargaining team, this is really not something that has made it onto the list, because it's just...stupid. It's stupid that we don't have sufficient copiers in my fucking building. At least the one in my wing was even actually working today, just slow as fuck, and being behind literally one other person fucked it all up.

But it was mostly okay, just...braindead. I am burnt out and tired and really want to go back to camp and be at Pinewoods again. I do not want to be in school anymore. The children are tired and I am also tired. I liked the parts where I could do simple mindless physical labour instead of abundant emotional and mental labour.

I'm also just real tired about being _busy_ all the time. I know where my break comes --right after Scottish Sessions-- and there's a _long_ way to go before then. A lot of said way is quite good! But there's a lot of it. Union meetings, dance meetings, eventually preparing my ESCape classes.

Stuff costs energy, especially when the background radiation is _real_ bad right now. I hope I can find the energy I need to do the stuff I want, and I hope you can too.

~Sor

MOOP!