Reading

Entry tags:

pope,
trumpii

A Tale in Two Headlines [pope, pols, US]

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"

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

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... )

Current Music: Oppenheimer Analysis, "Security Risk"

Entry tags:

patreon

Contamination begins almost immediately

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: Lucy Dacus, "Big Deal"

Flicking embers into daffodils

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.

Entry tags:

boston,
em

Not as it was [early music, MA]

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.

tiny delight

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 :-)

Current Music: Sunflower Bean, "Champagne Taste"

It's mortal primetime

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.

Entry tags:

medialog

Bookbookbook

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!

Entry tags:

ps longer letter later

things I wish to consolidate the cope to talk about

... 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.

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

Carve the sun into a diagram that reads to you

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.

(no subject)

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!

Current Music: Hozier, "Nobody's Soldier"

Entry tags:

patreon

Man, you can't do that in the Army

It would be facile to regard the war movies of Harry Morgan ironically in hindsight of M*A*S*H (1972–83). He was twenty-six years old when he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox in the fall of 1941; the odds that he wouldn't play in war pictures right out of the newly non-neutral gate of 1942 were astronomically against. He made his screen debut in boot camp and could be found thereafter on submarines, aircraft carriers, small Pacific islands, and the heartstrings of the home front. He could even be found in the Allied invasion of Sicily, whence my no-contest favorite of these early, military roles, the officious little captain of MPs in A Bell for Adano (1945). He is an ornament of welcome grit to his humane yet sometimes sentimentalized story and you couldn't get me within range of his chat-up lines for all the chocolate and cigarettes in the American zone.

In fairness to Captain Purvis of the 123rd Military Police Company, he's not the nemesis of the film. As in the best military comedies and tragedies, that distinction is reserved for the brass, in this case the Patton stand-in whose high-handed prohibition of mule carts from the narrow streets of Adano—one recalcitrant beast held up a whole convoy—threatens to blockade the small and demoralized, war-battered town as disastrously as if it were still an American objective. Purvis is merely the rules and regulations rolling downhill, a sarcastically sidemouthed goldbrick who regards the sincere bridge-building of John Hodiak's Major Joppolo as wasted on "spaghetti pushers" and cares most about learning the Italian for "How's about it, toots?" His CO listens seriously to the concerns of the citizenry about fishing rights, collaborators, the seven-hundred-year-old bell melted for artillery by the Fascists, Purvis crashes around the local girls as if he's paid for them with his vino and cracks about not knowing the difference in the blackout. As much cynical off-color as he contributes to individual episodes, however, he ties the plot together when the major coolly countermands his superior's unjust order and the scandalized captain indignantly initiates the time-honored practice of CYA: "I am not going to burn for anybody!" The ensuing round-robin of red tape is Helleresque, ricocheting as far as the dead letter office of Algiers with the blameless misdirections of William Bendix and Stanley Prager's Sergeants Borth and Trapani and the mounting exasperation of the Provost Marshal at Vicinamare, snowed under every report coming out of Adano except for the one about the carts. "He must think we've got nothing to do but worry about that jerkwater town." Inevitably, ironically, by the time the other shoe drops, Purvis has completely forgotten chucking it in the first place, as loyally defensive as the next guy of the major's good works until the penny bounces and leaves him scrubbing awkwardly at his mousy hair, mumbling the deeply pissant takeback, "Gosh, I never figured anything like that would happen." Partly it's the nature of the Army, rewarding even compassionate insubordination less than adherence to the kinks of the chain of command; it's also his own damn fault. In a film which devotes a soapish amount of its screen time to picturesque sketches of Italian peasantry from such traditionally reliable character actors as Marcel Dalio, Monty Banks, Henry Armetta, and Eduardo Ciannelli, not to mention an unconsummated affair which not even Gene Tierney as the defiantly blonde-bleached Tina Tomasino can totally sell as a meeting of human lonelinesses as opposed to shoring romance, Purvis has an ignorantly realistic, graffiti feel, a Kilroy scrawl of a figure who could have done nothing to improve the international standing of the American G.I. He also gets the funniest scene in the picture, when he incautiously takes a call meant for the major and finds himself put so comprehensively on blast that he can't get a word in to identify himself and when he's further instructed to hand the phone off to his own person, panics a visible, receiver-juggling second before blurting up a half-octave as harassed as Shelley Berman: "Hello? This is Captain Purvis speaking?" Morgan could be a great tough actor, but he could also wind up terrifically, and I appreciate any role that gave him the chance for both. His desk is a jackstraws of untended reports in which it is more than possible to disappear a paper simply by flipping it under the stack.

Directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Norman Reilly Raine, A Bell for Adano was the second dramatization of John Hersey's 1944 Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, its theatrical run overlapping the Broadway adaptation which had preceded it; its author would become even more famous for the New Journalism of Hiroshima (1946), which I read decades ago in the plain-jacketed first edition inherited from my grandparents. A Bell for Adano began as nonfiction itself before branching out into something more creative, although the distance between Adano and Major Victor P. Joppolo and Licata and Major Frank E. Toscani remained so slim as to land the writer in an amicably settled libel suit over his inconsistent filing off of serial numbers. At their best, both versions resist the pull of flag-waving, their idealism about the American occupation continually complicated by a still-resonant skepticism of its ethics and effectiveness—Joppolo achieves a victory of humanitarianism on the justified level of local legend and for his pains gets relieved of command and the war, not yet won in the summer of 1943, rolls on. The film gets a documentary boost from the street-wide photography of Joseph LaShelle, but Richard Conte so neorealistically steals his one hard scene as a repatriated POW that it begs the question of what he could have done with the Bronx-born, Italian-American Joppolo. Maybe I just prefer John Hodiak when he's codependently entangled with Wendell Corey. "Listen, if that meatball already thinks the Navy's efficient, he's going to get the surprise of his life. I'll have that bell for him in a week." It came out between V-E and V-J Day and seemed a suitable candidate for Memorial Day, allowing for somewhat fuzzed-out YouTube. Not to recant my earlier point entirely, it is delightful to watch Harry Morgan playing exactly the kind of character Colonel Potter wouldn't have given two colorfully minced oaths for. This town brought to you by my can-do backers at Patreon.

More Work Less Weekend

Sunday of work weekend was fine (and complicated and stressful because Mice) but mostly uneventful and my brain went a little sideways for some parts of it, which was not the best. I think maybe the most satisfying part of Sunday --and a little bit of today-- was developing new skills and practicing at them some, and getting reasonably good at them.

The new skill from yesterday was sewing, and specifically doing a very fine whip stitch with almost hidden stitches to get the edge on for a quilt (basting? Is that what it was?) I was taught by Kimberly-(Lucretia's-Mom) who is entirely lovely and was calm, good at teaching, and a lovely conversationalist. I will probably never love sewing, but it's good to remember that it and I can be friends, and it's very good to have chances to learn skills with it sometimes.

The new skill from today was Ditch Digging! Elliot was in charge of doing some path-shaping to get water to travel the correct directions (off the path) and a little bit of berm shaping and the like. My first ditch was, uh, a little too extreme, but I took his good feedback and by the end of it, I think I had a pretty good sense of how to make the path go the ways I wanted it to.

In the afternoon, I did a little bit of other helpful things, and then suddenly was gifted with the truly wonderful present of a working Hobart. Well okay then, I *will* wash the last few dozen loads of dishes, since I don't have to then drag them through the sanitizer as well! Critically, this meant all the flatware, which was going to be _miserable_ to have to drop in the sanitizer and then retrieve. I also now know exactly how many trays are at camp (both the Good Kind and the shitty kind.) The margin is...a _lot_ closer than I would've expected, honestly.

It was _so pleasant_ to spend the last three hours of my work weekend in the kitchen, by myself, just me and the music cranked and the hobart humming along and round after round of dishes. Isaac even brought me some soap so that I wouldn't have to run to Dingle every time I needed to wash my hands between dirty side and clean side. It is good to learn new skills and get better at them! It is also real fucking good to just do skills that I am already competent at and feel like I have good agency for.

It was also really nice to feel like I could make Actually Useful And Sensible Decisions about how to run things through. My only concession to Amanda being the Head Of Kitchen was to send a text being all "I'm doing the rest of them and you can't stop me", I didn't need to ask her for advice because I could think through all the things that needed to happen and just...do them!

Like, there's this thing I do where I be Extremely Confident which dovetails in interesting ways with that thing I do where I be Extremely Nosy About How Everything Everywhere Works. I worry that people might not be standing up to me enough about their own expertise sometimes --like, it is cute for Seramay to defer to me on cabin opening things, he has _way_ more experience doing so than I do! But also, I do have a fair chunk of experience and I tend to be competent in general, so yeah, it's not unreasonable to be all "okay Kat, go get the clotheslines up in the Bamps and the hill, have fun".

Anyways, it felt nice to be helpful (Amanda sent me a very nice text at the end when I was finished) and it was very nice that I got to do a _lot_ of dishwashing which is my absolute favourite job at camp 5ever. I don't mind opening cabins, and digging/carrying/general grounds nonsense is fine. But this particular work weekend I got to send...gods...Okay so like, there were 16 flats of just trays to go through the Hobart and that wasn't even half of what I did today. I probably pushed well over 200 flats through on Saturday? 300 maybe? I wish I had counted, because it was _wonderful_.

*and* I got to fill four fire bins, which is close to half the ones at camp, and is my other favourite job. I loved _so much_ two years ago when I got to do the camp safety audit and I briefly knew where literally every fire extinguisher was at camp. I also love running through and checking the AEDs, although I noted that they weren't up yet for this year.

So yeah, this was a very satisfying work weekend where I did a lot of things I liked, and made some good connections because of it. (I was working with this summer's dishwasher on Saturday and gave her plenty of random advice; this year's potwasher is totally new to camp and I think I left a good impression. And the head cook for the weekend is charming and I think I have successfully charmed them in return).

I really don't want to go back to the real world. LCFD in a couple weeks, which is good, but man, there is a _lot_ of grading between here and there.

~Sor
MOOP!

Aglow

I just got a letter from a doctoral student at the University of Pisa, working "on the sociocultural implications of fantasy literature." She very much admires my essay on "The Languages of the Fantastic" and kindly wrote to tell me so. I'm glowing.

Nine

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vital functions

vital functions

Reading. ( Bridget Collins, Feather (lalaietha), Jenny Lawson )

Listening. More Hidden Almanac, including First Appearance of Pastor Drom; slightly grumpy with myself for dozing through a chunk of it (to a greater extent than I realised; I did get snippets, but missed more than was apparent at the time) and am steeling myself to relisten.

Cooking. More from East: aubergine katsu curry with pickled radish (meh on my part, but A liked it), roasted carrots and cabbage with gochujang (meh on A's part, but I liked it enough to nibble at it between meals even though I'm unlikely to make it again), asparagus and mangetout with chilli peanut crumb (not actually worth spending in-season asparagus on outside the Cook Everything In This Book project, but pleasing given that context).

Eating. WILD ASPARAGUS is I think the most exciting thing I have eaten this week.

I have been Disappointed by Wagamama. Much less disappointingly, I have been plied with blueberries and yoghurt. Finished the hazel-bay-rye-and-rhubarb cake; have made some progress on the birthday cake I got sent home with.

Exploring. I am currently Away From Home. There are postbox toppers. One of them is Many Round Hedgehogs; another is Sea Creatures including Mollusc. I am sort of curious about who else I might spot in the area.

Making & mending.

Growing. ... I did not get cucumbers started. I did get some more squash into the ground (well, raised beds), and planted out a bunch of tomatoes, and at least two kinds of pea are now flowering, and I will be mildly resentful if I get home and discover all the strawberries have been eaten.

Did I mention that my established rocket remains established? I was a little concerned that I'd buried it under too much manure, and then it showed up in the next bed over.

Observing. BABY WOODPECKER.

Current Music: Primitive Radio Gods, "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth"

Moonlight spills on comic books and superstars in magazines

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts. It leads off with my poem "The Ghost Summer," inspired by the season I wrote it at the end of and given a gorgeously night-eyed illustration by Sarah Walker. Other contributors to its store of specters include Natasha Liora, Andy Joynes, Brandon Barrows, David Barker, Rebecca Buchanan, Maxwell I. Gold, Christopher Ropes, John Claude Smith, Lisa Morton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Daniel Braum, Can Wiggins, Mark McLaughlin, Duane Pesice, Ngo Binh Anh Khoa, Peter Rawlik, M Ennenbach, Robert Jeschonek, Michael Thomas Ford, Adam Bolivar, Russ Parkhurst, and dozens more. Check it out! Feeling like an apparition yourself is not compulsory.

Current Music: Peter Pears & Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped"

I mean the truth untold

I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

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UPDATE: Light and Love (Death Mask side story) + Three Lands omnibuses + news

All of the fiction below is free.

E-BOOKS (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Law Links: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). Few events are more thrilling in a young man's life than a blood feud between two villages. Or so Adrian thought. ¶ Torn between affection toward his traditional-minded father and worship of his peace-loving, heretical priest, Adrian finds himself caught between two incompatible visions of his duty to the gods. Then the Jackal God sends Adrian a message that will disrupt his world and send him fleeing to a new and perilous life. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Reissued omnibus, with new front matter and back matter; no changes to the story texts.

Death Mask: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). For eighteen years, he has survived in an army unit where few soldiers live more than two or three years. Now he finds himself in circumstances where his life is a living hell. Will the soldier who defied death find that life is too great a challenge? ¶ Soldiers, spies, slaves, rebels, assassins, gods, and men who set out to break him . . . The Lieutenant of the Border Mountain Patrol will learn that his greatest test is himself. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). New omnibus, with typos corrected and a new novelette:

Light and Love (Death Mask side story): In a world where two people who love each other must enter into the role of antagonists, what will preserve their love? ¶ Tryphena is a maiden. To her brother falls the responsibility of choosing her husband. ¶ Then war comes, and with it arrive a wise goddess of death and destruction, an enemy soldier of uncertain character, and a masked god who can turn evil into good. ¶ Who will rule Tryphena's heart and conscience? And how can she and her brother prevent war from breaking out between them?

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Latest installments:

( News )

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on pain of pain

[pain] notes

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

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FIC: The lower floor of the royal residence (Tempestuous Tours)

The lower floor of the royal residence is guarded at its entrances, for obvious reasons. It houses only servants these days, but in past years, it was fully as active as the upper floors.

Left to right, you will see the former bedchamber of the High Lord, the former receiving chamber of the council, a former service chamber, the former and current royal receiving chamber and dining chamber, and the royal sanctuary. The last requires extended commentary.