lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-06-15 09:41 pm

"And Though The Static Walls Surround Me." (Vorkosigan Saga) G



Title: And Though The Static Walls Surround Me.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Series: Part 11 of Are You Out There, Can You Hear This?
Rating: G
A/N: The title is from Are You Out There by Dar Williams.
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Miles is hanging out with mercenaries. Gregor has a headache and would rather be listening to the radio. Or: Warrior's Apprentice in radioverse.


Let's do the time skip again! )

idficmod: black-and-white line art icon of a human brain (Default)
idficmod ([personal profile] idficmod) wrote in [community profile] yuletide2025-06-15 08:00 pm

IPQ 2025 PDPHs

Event: Id Pro Quo
Event link: [community profile] idproquo
Pinch hit link: https://idproquo.dreamwidth.org/tag/pinch+hits
Due date: June 20th, 10pm EDT
Work Minimums: 2k fic or finished artwork

PH 16 - 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga), NoPixel (Web Series), 鴨乃橋ロンの禁断推理 | Kamonohashi Ron no Kindan Suiri | Ron Kamonohashi: Deranged Detective (Manga), Crossover Fandom

PH 21 - 阴阳师 | Yīn Yáng Shī | The Yin-yang Master (Movies - Guo Jingming), 陰陽師 | Onmyouji (Anime 2023), 밤에 피는 꽃 | Knight Flower (TV)

PH 22 - Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives - Jeffrey Dean, Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives - Jeffrey Dean, Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives - Jeffrey Dean, Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives - Jeffrey Dean, Vampire: The Masquerade Port Saga (Podcast), Path of Night (Podcast), Path of Night (Podcast)

PH 40 - 今際の国のアリス | Imawa no Kuni no Alice | Alice in Borderland (TV), The Ancient One - Cat2000, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins, Mortal Kombat (Video Games 1992-2020), Mortal Kombat (Video Games 2023-), Marvel Cinematic Universe

PH 47 - Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon)

PH 49 - Clean Slate (TV), High Potential (TV), Crossover Fandom, Crossover Fandom, Crossover Fandom

Thank you for considering our pinch hits!

bloodygranuaile: (Default)
bloodygranuaile ([personal profile] bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-06-15 05:15 pm

In which everyone is really in the soup, and the soup is made out of bug vomit

June’s entry in the Vorkosigan Saga read was A Civil Campaign, which had been hyped to me as a Regency romance dropped in the middle of this futuristic mil-sci-fi series. I’m not a huge Regency romance reader unless it is by actual Regency-era social comic Jane Austen, but the mixing up of Regency romance with the futuristic mil-sci-fi world of the Vorkosigan Saga and its charmingly nasty throwback empire of Barryar intrigued me, plus I already know and am invested in most of these characters. I really enjoyed Komarr, and I was actually interested in the dynamic between Miles and Ekaterin, so I was quite curious to see how this went now that Ekaterin is back on Barrayar.

In proper romantic comedy style, it goes very poorly, for everybody. Now that the big bad terrorist plot of the previous book has been foiled, everyone is going full-bore insane about Emperor Gregor’s wedding, except possibly Emperor Gregor, who is patiently bearing up under the weight of all the imperial pomp and nonsense associated with the wedding, apparently grounded both by his entire personality and the desire to get to the being married part without incident. Ivan has been press-ganged into service to his mother Lady Alys and a battalion of Vor matron social captains; Ekaterin is fending off unwanted suitors with both hands–at one point, literally–and trying to find work; Miles is trying to court Ekaterin without her noticing and also engage in some politicking in the Council of Counts. Mark has adopted a brilliant but utterly common-sense-free bug scientist and is trying to develop a real company with him and the help of some of the younger Koudelka girls, which is complicated by the Koudelka parents’ reaction to his relationship with Kareen.

This is the base state of problems established in the first few chapters. Things get much more contentious as Ivan’s old girlfriend Lady Donna takes a quick trip to Beta Colony to become Barrayar’s first openly transmasculine Vor, squarely for the purpose of inserting herself into the line of succession for a Countship. One thing I liked about this particularly pseudo-Regency book was all the “battle of the sexes” type bullshit was put quite squarely on Barrayar’s patriarchal culture and not any kind of “men are from mars, women are from venus” type gender essentialist bullshit. The men and the women are both from Barrayar, and if Barrayar stays a man’s world for much longer, it might one of these days find itself shorter on women than it already is.

Anyway, resting upon this foundation of fairly serious commentary about gender roles, the book consists largely of Shenanigans. There is an utterly disastrous dinner party, an extremely silly scene involving the Koudelka girls throwing bug butter at a pair of Escobarian cops, some tragic letter-writing, a Very Dramatic Parliamentary Scene in the Council of Counts, multiple awkward marriage proposals, some very satisfying psychological warfare from Countess Cordelia once she shows up again, and a nice helping of competence porn from all quarters as everyone slowly pulls themselves out of the holes they’ve dug themselves into, stops stepping on every rake on Barrayar, and rediscovers their ability to kick ass and take names. All the men get engaged (except Ivan) and all the women get jobs. There is a little bit of And Then Gregor Fixes Everything which really highlights just how utterly fucked Barrayar would be if basically anyone else were Emperor and how utterly fucked it will become if it doesn’t change before somebody else becomes Emperor. But, given that the Council of Counts says trans rights (in a very roundabout and fucked-up way that really wouldn’t pass muster in a serious society), it appears Barrayar is changing, and there may be hope yet.
duckprintspress: (Default)
duckprintspress ([personal profile] duckprintspress) wrote2025-06-15 11:08 am

A Rainbow of Queer Books for Pride 2025: Yellow

Graphic 1 of 3. Text over a yellow blot over the 8-striped 1978 Gilbert Baker Rainbow Flag. The text reads: Yellow Books for Pride.
Graphic 2 of 3. 10 book covers over the 8-striped 1978 Gilbert Baker Rainbow Flag. The books are: Golden Hue by May Barros; The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller; She Gets the Girl by Alyson Derrick & Rachael Lippincott; The Honey Witch by Sydney J. Shields; Burning Roses by S.L. Huang; Given by Natsuki Kizu; Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone; The Persian Boy by Mary Renault; Crumbs by Danie Stirling; Days Without End by Sebastian Barry.
Graphic 3 of 3. 10 book covers over the 8-striped 1978 Gilbert Baker Rainbow Flag. The books are: The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay; Exordia by Seth Dickinson; Snapdragon by Kat Leyh; King Cheer by Molly Horton Booth & Stephanie Kate Strohm; The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer; Hitorijime My Hero by Memeko Arii; Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane; A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine; Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker; Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

HAPPY PRIDE 2025! For Pride this year, we’re changing up our usual rec lists. Instead of doing books with specific identities or themes, we’re focused this time on cover color! Throughout the month of June, we’ll be doing 8 rec lists, each with covers inspired by one of the colors of the original Gilbert Baker Pride Flag. We drew a little additional inspiration from the meaning behind the color and why it was included in the original LGBTQIA+ flag (in this case, yellow = sunlight), but we prioritized color over meaning. The contributors to this list are: May Barros, Rascal Hartley, polls, Shadaras, Tris Lawrence, Shannon, Nina Waters, and Alex.

Find these and many other queer books on our Goodreads book shelf or buy them through the Duck Prints Press Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Join Book Lover’s Discord server to chat with us about books, fandom, and more!



james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-06-15 08:51 am
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-06-14 10:49 pm

Perform the ritual that puts me in the part

Being left to my own devices this week with a pile of unfamiliar Agatha Christie, I naturally read them one after the other. I have nothing especially to note about Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1934) or The Sittaford Mystery (1931) except that it turned out to be a duplicate of the US-titled The Murder at Hazelmoor and I swapped it out for Dolores Hitchens' Cat's Claw (1943), but Christie's They Came to Baghdad (1951) is a reasonably wild ride of a novel which mixes several different flavors of spy thriller with a romance conducted on an archaeological dig at Tell Aswad, which I didn't even need to bet myself had been excavated by Max Mallowan. Minus the nuclear angle, its global conspiracy is right out of an interwar thriller—Christie to her credit defuses much of the potential for antisemitism with references to Siegfried and supermen instead—as is its Ambler-esque heroine gleefully launching herself into international intrigue with little more than her native wits and talent for straight-faced improvisation, but its spymaster is proto-le Carré, the chronically shabby, fiftyish, vague-looking Dakin, a career disappointment rumored to drink who never looks any less tired when dealing with affairs of endangered state. He gave me instant Denholm Elliott and never seems to have recurred in another novel of Christie's, alas. I made scones with candied ginger and sour cherries and lemon tonight.
thistleingrey: (Default)
thistle in grey ([personal profile] thistleingrey) wrote2025-06-14 06:55 pm
Entry tags:

in conclusion, age is a number

Stupidly, I keep referring to my age without meaning to in conversation, then catching it only afterwards. I already know I'm a bit insecure about the age I turn this calendar year; it'd be fine if my mouth would quit confirming it, repeatedly.

OTOH, though I still can't go for a walk without detectable negative consequences, core strength remains approximately intact: I've just carried one microwave across two rooms and a doorway gate (the one that keeps tiny housemate in the kitchen---her paws reach the top bar if she lunges upwards, and on me it's between knee and hip height), then carried another microwave the same distance in the opposite direction. short and boring )

*tilts head* That seems to be enough words. Far fewer than I used to lob at related topics.
kareila: "Mom, I'm hungry." "Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday." (coding)
kareila ([personal profile] kareila) wrote in [community profile] changelog_digest2025-06-14 08:42 pm

Changelog Digest for Sat, Jun 14

[dreamwidth]

afe5e1f: Issue #3449: update code references to offsite status account
Update offsite status account link from Twitter to Bluesky.
560a245: Issue #3488: Mark/remove textcaptcha
Removes DW::Captcha::textCAPTCHA and related code (RIP).
ff257b2: Issue #3488: Mark/remove textcaptcha
Fix default captcha type now that textCAPTCHA has been removed.
b1bfceb: Commit b1bfceb
Remove setup for bit-rotted 32 bit architecture support.
musesfool: a loaf of bread (staff of life)
i did it all for the robins ([personal profile] musesfool) wrote2025-06-14 07:27 pm

gotta love the kids keeping score

I knew it was coming, but I'm still sad about Chris Kreider getting traded to the Ducks. He's been my favorite since Lundqvist retired, not just because I liked his play but also because I thought it was unlikely he'd get traded. *hands* After this past season, I understand blowing it all up, but it's still sad. He definitely had some signature moments in a Rangers uni, and I will miss him.

In other news, this morning, I made this baked oatmeal and it's good, but probably needs a little more cinnamon? Or maybe some allspice? Hmm... It'll be nice for breakfast over the next few days. Next weekend I'll make banana bread since I now have a bunch of bananas, since i needed one for this recipe. (It was either applesauce or bananas, and I'm more likely to eat/use the bananas, so...)

And then this afternoon, I made this pizza dough, which turned out well, but took a full hour to double in size, despite what the recipe says, so dinner was later than planned. I topped it with some mozzarella and this white sauce. it was good! (Pictures here.)

Tomorrow, I'll be making teriyaki chicken meatballs for lunch for the week. Right now, every surface in my kitchen is covered in drying dishes, which is the real annoyance of the dishwasher not working.

*
sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
soph ([personal profile] sophia_sol) wrote2025-06-14 02:03 pm

aphantasia

I'm aphantasic - I do not and cannot create pictures in my mind's eye. My mind does not have an eye. But there have been just a few times very recently where in the first moments upon waking in the morning, there's an image in my mind and I feel like I can SEE it. Like, see it see it! As if I were looking at it with my eyes! It always vanishes within a few moments, but my god, is that a glimpse into what it's like to NOT be aphantasic??

Now, though, I'm wondering which of several things is true:

1. Am I weirdly suddenly able to access a tiny amount of picturing things, out of nowhere?

Or

2. Is the dreamy confusion of waking up making me *feel* like I'm picturing things but not *actually* picturing things? It lasts so briefly that I actually can't be sure!

Or

3. Have I always genuinely able to picture things in my sleep, but not awake, but because I only conscsiously experience dreams through the medium of remembering them, I've never been able to tell that - and a change in recent sleeping habits means I have been holding on to a snatch of a dream just long enough to get the sense of it with my waking mind?

Or something else????

Anyway these brief snatches of mind-pictures have been a baffling thing to experience, as something I've never previously been able to do in my life ever, and all of a sudden I'm a little more of a true believer that other people DO do this thing all the time!

It always seemed so fake to me before. So made up. How could a person PICTURE things?! That's just a metaphor, surely! We're using words about images to describe the experience of thinking about a thing, because the actual experience of thinking is so unlike anything in the physical world that there are no words to describe it! Right? Right????

I guess for lots of people, they literally are creating pictures in their head with their brains, all the time.

WILD.

Now I really wish I had a better way to explain what my experience of thinking is like, tbh. Because all I have is metaphor, to translate it into words! But those metaphors are apparently concrete factual experiences to other people, so I won't be successfully communicating!

This is similar to my experience with words, btw. I *can* think in words, more than I can with pictures, but that's me deliberately creating the words and sentences. I'm translating my thoughts into words with conscious effort.

My thoughts aren't words. My thoughts aren't pictures. My thoughts are thoughts!

How are so many people's thoughts NOT just thoughts!
goss: Paint Brushes (Paint Brushes)
goss ([personal profile] goss) wrote2025-06-14 12:31 pm

Art (Drawesome Challenge #71- Pride!)

Title: Jim
Artist: [personal profile] goss
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Character: Jim Jimenez
Rating: G
Content Notes: For [community profile] drawesome Challenge #71 - Pride!. Digital drawing of Jim, an awesome non-binary character on Our Flag Means Death, using the non-binary flag colours yellow, white, purple and black. I was also inspired by the ceaseless fluidity and flow of the wide open ocean. :)

Preview:
Jim Jimenez

Click here for entire artwork )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-06-14 09:03 am
Entry tags:

Books Received, June 7 to June 13



Ten books new to me: 4.5 fantasy, 1 horror, 1 mystery, 3.5 science fiction, of which only two are identified as series.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13



Poll #33251 Books Received, June 7 to June 13
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (March 2026)
19 (40.4%)

The Swan’s Daughter: A Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi (January 2026)
13 (27.7%)

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney (June 2025)
25 (53.2%)

The Storm by Rachel Hawkins (January2026)
4 (8.5%)

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (September 2025)
26 (55.3%)

Red Empire by Jonathan Maberry (March 2026)
2 (4.3%)

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O’Keefe (June 2025)
14 (29.8%)

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts by Vanessa Ricci-Thode (April 2024)
13 (27.7%)

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (January 2026)
6 (12.8%)

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2025)
25 (53.2%)

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

Cats!
30 (63.8%)

pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)
Res facta quae tamen fingi potuit ([personal profile] pauamma) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2025-06-13 11:14 pm
Entry tags:

Question thread #142

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.
marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
marthawells ([personal profile] marthawells) wrote2025-06-13 12:08 pm

Murderbot Day

* Interview with Sue Chan, the production designer:

https://filmstories.co.uk/news/murderbot-designing-a-future-world-that-doesnt-look-like-alien/

“I started out by taking the most ancient societies on each continent – Etruscans, Asian, European, and African cultures,” Chan tells us. “I looked at the most fundamental motifs and gathered them into a bible, then asked my team to imagine 100 generations from now, when the diaspora of Earth have chosen to live together in society. How would they evolve a unified set of symbols? A language that really honours where they came from.”

This informed the alphabet that can be seen in the decoration painted across the otherwise grey, corporate habitat the PresAux crew are leasing. At the same time, acknowledging how much of the crew is queer and polyamorous, the colours of the rainbow are also entwined into their decorations.

“All of that is mashed up but it has a fundamental logic to it,” says Chan.




* Interview with Akshay Khanna (Ratthi):

https://squaremile.com/style/akshay-khanna-murderbot-actor-interview/

I’m incredibly excited for people to watch Murderbot on Apple TV+. Sci-fi has been my favourite genre by a country mile forever, and being on a show like this has always been a career goal of mine. Frankly, I had too much fun filming that show, and getting paid to do it constantly felt like I was getting away with something on set.

And the show is just so good. I can confidently say it’s fantastic – and if you don’t like it, then I would gently tell you that it’s OK to be wrong sometimes.



* Interview with Sabrina Wu (Pin-Lee):

https://www.autostraddle.com/sabrina-wu-interview-murderbot/

And then once I got the role, I read the books and I was legit just blown away at how funny the books were. I just haven’t seen such a dry sarcastic sensibility with this kind of hero sci-fi stories. And then I also just really liked that it was in the tradition of I felt like Octavia Butler, where it’s like, “oh, this is a queer imagining of the future.” So I don’t know. I just thought it was a really sweet, funny, different world. I also, obviously every comedian who becomes an actor, their dream is to get to work on something with action to move beyond an It’s Always Sunny kind of comedy. I believe there was already an opportunity for me to be in a spaceship and shoot guns, and it just made me happy that it was genuinely funny source material.



* Video interview with Tattiawna Jones (Arada) and Tamara Podemski (Bharadwaj):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NllgfEekw9s



* And a video interview with Noma Dumezweni (Mensah)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZpigqUqZXQ



* and a video interview with Noma and David Dastmalchian (Gurathin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=361cKOujISE



* And a video interview (with a transcript) with Alexander Skarsgard, Jack McBrayer, and Paul and Chris Weitz:

https://collider.com/murderbot-alexander-skarsgard-jack-mcbrayer-creators-paul-weitz-chris-weitz/


* And there is a profile of me in The New Yorker (!!)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/do-androids-dream-of-anything-at-all
thistleingrey: (Default)
thistle in grey ([personal profile] thistleingrey) wrote2025-06-13 09:27 am
Entry tags:

obviously

When I was a kid, it was expected that the school-day began with the whole class standing to recite the pledge of allegiance. It was nearer the McCarthy era, and the Cold War was still a thing. One effect of doing this in greater Los Angeles is that when Spanish class was first period (the start of the day), obviously we recited the pledge in Spanish.

After Latin, dead French, and other dead languages with only intermittent use of diacritics, my sense of modern Spanish orthography is a bit impressionistic; I'm not checking where the acute accents would go. But my inner 12yo holds the sounds:
Juro fidelidad a la bandera de los estados unidos de américa y a la república que symboliza---una nación, dios mediante, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.

We landed hard on the first word, such that it sounded like juró, "one swore"; and dios mediante is for "under god" in English, but they aren't quite the same, are they. Anyway, para todos: sí.
duckprintspress: (Default)
duckprintspress ([personal profile] duckprintspress) wrote2025-06-13 10:48 am

Pride Dragons on Parade: Rainbow Pride Flag Dragons!

Artwork of a small orange dragon flying upward, wings visible on its sides and belly exposed. Its belly is yellow with a purple circle, in the shades of the intersex pride flag. Its wings are striped with the colors of the intersex inclusive progress pride flag. Below the dragon is the intersex-inclusive progress pride flag and text that reads "Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag."Artwork of a small red dragon with a large head. It has wings with stripes in the 8 colors of the Gilbert Baker Pride flag. They are spread above it, and it is looking playfully to its right. At the bottom is a reproduction of the Gilbert Baker Pride flag and text that reads "Gilber Baker's 8-Color 1978 Pride Flag."

We recently unveiled our next crowdfunded merchandise project, featuring ten adorable cat-like Pride-flag-inspired dragons by the artist Florilège! Before and during the campaign, we’ll be spending a little time giving y’all a better look at the individual Pride dragons – and where better to start than with rainbow Pride flags! We’ve chosen to do dragons inspired by two of the many general LGBTQIA+-inclusive flags – the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag, created in 2021 by Valentino Vecchietti; and the 8-Color Pride Flag created by Gilbert Baker in 1978.

These and 8 dragons inspired by the Pride flags for specific identities will be featured in our upcoming campaign. Florilège has made dragons inspired by the polyamorous pride flag; non-binary pride flag; aro-ace pride flag; genderqueer pride flag; demigender pride flag, pansexual pride flag; bisexual pride flag; and genderfluid pride flag.

Want one of these cuties as a sticker, magnet, key chain, or pair of earrings? Then make sure you don’t miss your chance to get ‘um – become a follower of our Kickstarter pre-launch page today!

Campaign launches Wednesday, June 18th and will end on Wednesday, July 2nd.



james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-06-13 09:04 am

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi



The embittered Martian aerialist and the nonconformist live a thousand-plus years apart, in different solar systems. What, then, connects them?

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-06-12 11:16 pm

Wish they'd drop the knife in the peep-show parking lot

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt. [personal profile] spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.
sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
soph ([personal profile] sophia_sol) wrote2025-06-12 08:58 pm

5 things: being bored at zoos, joplin plugins, an older sff book style, names, complimenting birds

one

thinking about how as a kid I found zoos super boring - and I think my problem was that, at least at that time, the expected mode of engagement with zoos was to stare at animals and be amazed at how interesting/cute/different they look?

for me, learning context is what makes an animal compelling! eg: I did a project on temperate rainforests in grade 6, and learned about banana slugs as part of the ecosystem. and subsequently loved them, even though I hadn't cared about slugs previously! if I'd been shown a real live banana slug after having done that project, I would have been fascinated to just watch it, because I would understand what I was seeing, and know what to look for in its behaviour and appearance to connect with the things I knew about it!

if the zoos I visited in my youth had done more to contextualise my understanding of what I was seeing, I think I could have had a good time. but instead I was presented with a few fun facts and the opportunity to see the animals, the end. and so I found them the height of boredom.

fun facts are useless to me! WHY are they fun! what makes this fact relevant! what caused things to be this way!!

(I had a similar problem with most museums. except dinosaur museums, to which I came with my own contextual knowledge, and thus could appreciate and enjoy the things on display, even when the display didn't provide much information itself)


two

oh!!! there's a plugin for joplin that allows android app users to see wordcount! and also to see line numbers, to make it easier to orient yourself within a long note! I love this


three

several podcasts I follow do reviews of older SFF novels (either occasionally or as their whole thing), and it has me thinking again about a type of story I think used to be more common in western genre fiction, and it's one I rather miss.

The type I mean: a narrative which is checking in on a specific place or people-group at different points in its long-term history, where the overarching narrative project is on a scale of eras while telling smaller personal stories within that history.

Sometimes it's done within the context of a single book, like in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes it's between books over the length of a series, like in the Dragonriders of Pern series¹. Either way, you get to see the cycles of history, the way that things which seem urgent and current at one point become historicised and mythologised, and become the ancient context for the new urgent current events, whether the people involved realise it or not. I love this shit! I love context. I love seeing how things connect. I love how the very notion of history becomes one of the major characters in the narrative!

From what I see, the modern western sff genre has become more interested in more immediate stories. Which have their benefits too, and which are really wonderful in their own way! And there's plenty about these older stories that I do not miss at all.

Maybe there are authors out there writing era-spanning sff today, and I just haven't come across them because there are other aspects of what those authors focus on that are super not to my tastes, or because the book is a small indie publishing situation that doesn't have good word-of-mouth, or something else like that....these are definitely possible! But I do miss getting invested in this kind of story. It's fun!

¹I won't say that all the books I once loved that do this thing were GOOD books


four

the names people choose - for themselves, their kids, their pets - is soooo interesting to me! but especially kids' names, tbh.

modern western culture places so much emphasis on the importance of the choice you make about your baby's name (compared to, say, the late middle ages, when half of all people in england were named one of the same few names) and since there's so much cultural weight on the choice, and it is by its nature a very public choice, you can tell a lot from the decisions people make!

what were their priorities, their influences, their values? what kind of naming community are they in, and how much does it fall in line with the rest of their country? so many factors go into each choice!

every time someone I know has a new kid, I'm always SO eager to find out the name...and then, if possible, get the story behind why they chose it! It's always so interesting!


five

recently I was out birding with some folks who have never been birding before, and one of them commented that they were delighted to discover from me that an important part of birding is complimenting every bird you see

and it's TRUE. it is an important part of birding! telling the birds what a great job they're doing, how cute/handsome/gorgeous they are, etc is something I am ALWAYS doing. instinctively and automatically. and I am so pleased to be modelling this attitude to others! :D
roadrunnertwice: Rebecca on treadmill. (Text: "She's a ROCKET SCIENTIST from the SOUTH POLE with FIFTY EXES?") (Rocket scientist (Bitter Girl))
Nick Eff ([personal profile] roadrunnertwice) wrote2025-06-12 11:50 am
Entry tags:

Bookpost: A bike zine, the Dao, a monster tower, and That Prince Valiant Thing

Sure, why not, let's bookpost.

Wren Hyde — Beneath a Burning Sky (zine)

Feb 27

A friend we know from Ruth's shapenote singing community wrote a zine about going on long bike tours. It's good! Wren generally puts a lot of energy into thinking about things like the practical exercise of freedom and the purpose of risking yourself on an adventure, and I always value the sense of being gently shaken out of autopilot that I get from talking to (or reading) them.

I don't know of anywhere a random person could obtain this from, but it's worth picking up if you happen to see it around.

Ken Liu — Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Translation for a Transformative Time

Mar. 30

(For now I’m putting Liu as the author here rather than Laozi, but I might reconsider at some point. He has a lot of commentary in his own voice interspersed throughout the book (on the Dao, on other Daoist writers, on the theory and practice of translation), so it’s not attempting to be an invisible translation.)

I picked this up because the ebook was on steep sale. My only real prior familiarity with this text was indirect, through the prints it leaves on the surrounding world, and those prints are ambiguous and elusive. Well... the text is also ambiguous and elusive. Even more so than I was expecting, and that’s saying something! Having carefully read it, I do not feel equipped to tell you what I think Daoism is about. Ask me in some later year, maybe.

I’m glad I read this and I expect to return to it. It’s deliberately aggravating and provocative, but in a gentle way. I really had no idea what to think of it right after finishing, but there are one or two ideas in there that have yielded a bit more as I mull them over in the background. (In particular, some paradoxes about the entire concept of “leading.”)

J.-C. Mézières, P. Christin, E. Tranlé — Valerian and Laureline: The Empire of a Thousand Planets and The Land Without Stars (comics)

Apr. 14

This long-running French sci-fi comic series came up in a conversation about The Fifth Element; I hadn't really heard of it, but it's apparently widely influential. The library had a bunch of it, so I checked out a couple volumes.

The art and the environment design in these is fabulous. But I found the stories a bit tedious and slight, and the cartooning (as distinct from the superb draftsmanship and composition) wasn't to my taste, so I don't expect to read much more of it.

This is that style of comic where the panels are lushly and meticulously detailed, but there aren't enough of them to properly control the narrative flow, and so they compensate by cramming a goddamn paragraph of captions above every other panel. My personal name for this phenomenon is "That Prince Valiant Thing," in honor of a baffling Sunday newspaper strip from my childhood that always seemed to have like one panel of dudes staring into space and a half-page of turgid narration in which absolutely nothing ever happened. I'm sure there's people who like this (or at least are better able to tolerate it), but I personally feel that it misses the point of the medium.

Tamsyn Muir — Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Apr. 10

I loved this gory inverted fairy tale about a self-made monster.

This novella has an extremely good Shape, and I wish I could define that better for you. I've had an ongoing background ponder running for years about what exactly the novella as a form is good for, and my current (tentative) thinking is that it's either for episodic stories, or for stories where you're trying to draw a very particular geometric structure with the plot (which requires more elbow room than a short, but which will have less success in a longer novel because it's harder for the reader to hold the whole of the shape in their head at once). The failure states for the novella are, of course, "short story that wasn't cut enough" and "novel with insufficient development."