Desperate to pay her brother Jasper's way out of Muhlenberg County, Opal accepts a job at an infamously cursed mansion.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Via selenak, of course :) This was a very interesting and somewhat odd historical fiction book about Francisco Goya, the painter, and his life and times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the book begins with the Spanish court talking about Marie Antoinette's recent death -- so ~1793 -- and ends around 1800). I must admit that Spain is a big hole in my already-very-spotty knowledge of Europe, although opera fandom and salon helped a lot by filling in at least a couple of gaps about Philip II, the Escorial, and the Duke of Alba (and Philip V who thought he was a frog, but who does not appear in this book at all). Now, of course, Philip II was a couple of centuries too soon for this book (even I knew that!) but he's namechecked a couple of times, as is Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Third Duke of Alba), again centuries too early but the forerunner of the Duchess of Alba in this book, who is a major character (María Cayetana de Silva; her husband Don José Álvarez de Toledo is a minor character).

Goya I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I knew he was a painter, and I knew (hilariously, from a Snoopy cartoon) he'd painted a kid with a dog (Google tells me this is his famous "Red Boy" painting). One of the really cool things about the book is the way it functions as an art guide (and one with a whole lot more context than usual art guides) to some of Goya's famous paintings. I only started following along with the wikipedia list of his paintings once I hit the middle or so (I read the first half on a plane and during a retreat), but I wish I'd done that the whole time! I know so little about art that it was helpful to have the "interpretation" of it right there (Feuchtwanger often includes the reaction of various people to the art piece, as well as Goya's feelings about it).

Indeed the book is dictated by the art, to a certain extent: if you look at Goya's pictures in chronological order (as I have now done), he does these sort of nice standard pictures until... about 1793, when the pictures start getting more interesting (and indeed the book starts with Goya making a breakthrough in his art). And then around 1800 is when he starts doing these crazy engravings that start looking much more modern -- like, you can totally see them as an artistic bridge between Bosch (namechecked in the book) and Dali (who obviously was yet to come far in the future) -- his book of engravings, Los Caprichos, is what the book ends on (and the title is taken from that of the last Caprichos engraving, Ya es hora).

It is curiously missing in any real sort of character arc -- I mean, Goya keeps talking about how he's progressed in life and thinks about things so differently now, but really he seems to me to be pretty much the same at the end as the beginning, except more battered by life. It's his art that has progressed, though. Instead of a character arc we have an art arc, I guess!

The book also cheerfully uses all the most sensational theories about Goya and the Spanish court possible, with the effect that it is quite compelling but does veer a bit into "wow, this is Very Soap Opera" at times. Basically, everyone is having torrid love affairs with everyone else, and all of that becomes totally relevant to all the politics that's going on. Some of this is attested historically, and some of it is less so. On one hand, Manuel Godoy, the Secretary of State, does appear to have had a close relationship with Queen Maria Luisa (Wikipedia, at least, does not think that there is any direct evidence they were lovers, but at least it's clear there were rumors). But as far as I can tell from Google, Maria Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, did die mysteriously, buuuuut there isn't any evidence at all that she died as a result of a botched abortion of Goya's baby. (Did I mention Very Soap Opera?? Yeah.)

It's sort of shocking to me that the book ends before any of the War of Spanish Independence, which happens just a few years later (which again, since I know zero Spanish history I just found out about while reading various wiki articles after reading this) or Goya's resulting engravings on The Disasters of War (ditto), although I guess all the signs are there as to what's going to happen -- it's not that different from what Feuchtwanger did in Proud Destiny, where even I know that the French Revolution is going to happen, but he doesn't show it in the book.

Requisite Feuchtwanger things: 1) protagonist is irresistable to the ladies and has multiple women who are crazy about him, check 2) small child dies, check.

Ranking in Feuchtwangers: I think the Josephus trilogy is still my favorite, and Jud Süß is still the one I'm most impressed by, but I did like this quite a bit, especially when I had the visuals to go with it.

I don't have much to say about books or TV, because I am still in the middle of my current read and current show. But! For those of you who casually enjoyed the podcast The Strange Case of Starship Iris, the third (and final) season is coming out now. There are a couple of "mini-sodes" which will help you catch up to what's going on, and two regular episodes, and the third will be out soon (it's out to high-dollar Patreons but I am a low-dollar contributor). I listened to the mini-sodes when they came out, and today on my run I listened to the first two regular episodes. Again, I kind of feel like I'm using dystopian fiction about authoritarian regimes as escapism from actual authoritarian regimes...

But the real reason I wanted to post was to say that I'm a bit more than 55% through Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and there's a 30% discount for it in the Steam sale which ends tomorrow, so - if my post last week intrigued you, I encourage you to buy it, it's inexpensive, it's captivating, it's sophisticated and spooky and atmospheric with occasional touches of humor, fourth-wall smashing, and weird supernatural stuff, and the puzzles are clever and thinky and (mostly) fun. As I mentioned, I told my brother about it and he bought it - and he finished it last night! He admits he got so into it that he put in way too many hours too quickly, but he really loved it.

If you do buy it, the hints page at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3249636035 is really great as it is nudge-y rather than sledge-y; it points you in the right direction (or tells you what a wrong direction is) which for me is mostly all I have needed.

Also, there are in-game espresso machines.

I made a mistake regarding patient charts at work - nothing life-threatening or genuinely harmful, simply highly improper procedure that created twice the work for myself and the practice instead of half the work that would've come from doing it right the first time. When asked about it, I said I could provide reasons and excuses and it didn't matter, I'd done the thing and would fix it.

Besides the lessons of "write everything down at least twice" and "most mistakes can be fixed", the main takeaway is the person who spoke to me about it assumed I was Gen Z and was a little surprised when I said I was a Millennial. Partly that's the nature of the mistake, and I think another part's simply how I look. Granted, he's nearly twice my age so anyone more than 20 years his junior is "young" by that standard. Even so, I'm going to take the skin care compliment.

Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

What are you currently reading?

Emilia Hart - Weyward I've been wanting to read this for ages and it was absolutely worth the wait. I only started it yesterday but I'm already uhh 53% through
Kelley Armstrong - Bitten A comfort re-read, dipping in and out as my mood pleases. I have so much love for Jeremy, for Clay, for the pack
Annie Worsley - Windswept My current borrowbox read - I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and I'm not quite sure what I think of it
Alice Roberts - Ancestors I have a teenytinyhugeass crush on Alice, not gonna lie. I'm about 75% through and should hopefully finish it soon

What did you recently finish reading?

Stephen Fry - Mythos 5/5 stars. Greek mythology at its most charming, clever, and chaotic. Stephen Fry retells these ancient stories with so much warmth and humour, I felt like I was being let in on the juiciest gossip from Olympus. Smart, sharp, and ridiculously entertaining — a perfect read for mythology lovers and curious mortals alike.
T Kingfisher - A House with Good Bones 5/5 stars. What starts as an odd visit home turns into a quietly horrifying unraveling of memory, family, and something deeply wrong under the wallpaper. It’s southern gothic with teeth, and I loved every uncanny, bug-filled page.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Erin Sterling - The Kiss Curse
Poppy Z Brite - Exquisite Corpse

three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today

💻 I did a solo payment run at work today. There was a lot of panic, but I got through it - everything balanced, everything submitted, and no one needed to rescue me.

📚 My gently used book club book arrived and it looks awesome! I love when second-hand books still have personality but are in really good shape.

🎾 Jannik won his Wimbledon quarterfinal against Sunshine - and there was a ridiculously adorable hug between Simone and Darren afterward. Just look at them: 😍

That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛
Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.

Actually I've been doing a ton of reading while I shake off the last of this influenza, which is mostly now lingering chest crud and zero stamina.

While nothing has blown me away, and I've abandoned some other "not for me" books, I did make a virtuous start on The Cull. Beginning with C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

My copy, the 1965 paperback edition printed in the US, has a cover that actually sort of fits the book, unlike a lot of SF covers of the time depicting generic space skies and cigar rocket ships, with or without a scantily clad lady joined by guys in glass helmets and bulky space suits.

No woman on the cover here, which would have been false advertising as the only woman on stage during the entire novel is a distraught country housewife in the first few pages. (And no, I do not think that this is a sign that Lewis despised women, so much as that he had spent all his childhood and early manhood among males, so his default characters are going to be "he" among "hims". But that's a discussion for another book.)

I've had Lewis's space trilogy since high school (1968). This one I read I think twice, once that year, and then again when the Mythopoeic Society had branches and our West LA discussion group covered the three books.

Teen-me trudged through the first reading looking for story elements that would interest me, and though a line here and there was promising, I found it overall tedious, missing the humor entirely. On that second reading during my college years I saw the humor, and found more to appreciate in Lewis's thematic argument, but that was a lukewarm enough response that I never reread it during the ensuing fifty years.

Now in old age it's time to cull a massive print library that neither of my kids wants to inherit. What to keep and what to donate? I reread this book finally, and found myself largely charmed. The structure is strongly reminiscent of the fin de siecle SF of Wells, Verne, etc--inheritors of the immensely popular "travelogue" of the 1600-1700s--which means it moves rather slowly, full of the description of discovery (and anticipatory terror) as its protagonist, a scholar named Ransom, stumbles into a situation that gets him kidnapped by a figure from his boarding school days, Weston, and Weston's companion, a man named Devine.

As was common in the all-male world of British men of Lewis's social strata, the men all go by last names--I don't think Weston or Devine are ever given a first name, and there are at most two mentions of Ransom's first name, Elwin, which I suspect was only added as a nod to JRRT. Apparently this book owes its origin to a bet made between Lewis and Tolkien, which I think worth mentioning because of the (I think totally wrong) assumptions that Lewis was anti-science. The bet, and the dedication to Lewis's brother, make it plain that they read and enjoyed science fiction--had as boys.

I suppose it's possible to eagerly read SF and still be anti-science, but I don't think that's the case here; accusations that Lewis hates scientific progress seem to go hand-in-hand with scorn for Lewis's Christianity. But I see the scientific knowledge of mid-thirties all over this book. In fact, I don't recollect reading in other contemporary SF (admittedly I haven't read a lot of it) the idea that once you're out of Earth's gravity well, notions of up and down become entirely arbitrary. Though Lewis seems not to understand freefall, he does represent the changes in gravity and in light and heat--it seems to me that the science, though full of errors that are now common knowledge, was as up-to-date as he could make it. That also shows in the meticulous worldbuilding--and to some extent in the fun he had building his Martian language.

What he argues against when the three men are at last brought before the god-like Oyarsa, is a certain attitude toward Progress as understood then, and also up through my entire childhood: that it didn't matter what you did to other beings or to the environment, as long as it was in the name of Progress or Humanity. We get little throwaways right from the start that Lewis's stance clear, such as when Devine and Weston squabble about having a guard dog to protect their secret space ship, but Devine points out that Weston had had one but experimented on it.

Lewis hated vivisection. He knew it was torture for the poor helpless beasts in the hands of the vivisectionists, who believed animals had no feelings, etc etc. He also hated the byproducts of mass industrialization, as he makes plain in vivid images. Lewis also makes reference to splitting the atom and its possible results; I think it worthwhile to note that during the thirties no one knew what the result would be--but there was a lot of rhetoric hammering that we need bigger and better bombs, and splitting the atom would give us that. All in the name of Humanity. Individual lives have no meaning, and can be sacrificed with impunity as long as it's in the name of "saving Humanity."

As his theme develops, it's made very clear that moral dilemmas trouble Ransom--he's aware that humans contain the capability for brilliant innovation and for vast cruelty. He also holds up for scruntiny the idea that the (white) man is the pinnacle of intelligence in the cosmos. The scene when Weston talks excruciating pidgin in his determination to subordinate the Martians and their culture to the level of "tribal witch doctors" is equally hilarious and cringey.

In short, it took over fifty years for me to appreciate this book within the context of its time. I don't feel any impulse to eagerly reread it, but I might some day. At any rate, it stays on the shelf.

The latter half of Pyramid's ten-year run, the issues published from November 2013 to December 2018, sixty-two issues in all.

Bundle of Holding: Pyramid 2

You know that moment, a few pages into a new book or fanfic, where you realise, oh no (but actually oh yes)—this is going to hit every one of your buttons? I love that. Some tropes just get me, no matter how many times I’ve seen them. I will fall for them again and again, gleefully, like it’s the first time. So today, in no particular order, here are the ones that always work on me.

Fake Dating
Top-tier. Always iconic. I don't care if it's full-on romcom chaos or angsty mutual pining in disguise, if two characters have to pretend to be together for Reasons? I'm in. Especially if they’re bad at pretending. Especially if they’re too good at pretending. Especially if one of them catches feelings first and doesn’t know what to do about it. Especially that moment, you see it coming from a mile away, that moment when, as the reader, you see the date turning real but they haven't yet twigged? It's delicious.

Grumpy x Sunshine
Give me the sour-faced one who doesn’t know how to deal with feelings, and the beaming one who crashes into their life like a golden retriever in human form. Let them banter. Let them slowly learn each other’s edges. Let the sunshine one get quietly intense sometimes, and the grumpy one be soft underneath. Peak comfort.

Forced Proximity
Trapped in a lift? Snowed in at a cabin? On the run and handcuffed together? YES. Stick them in a space they can't leave, turn the tension up to eleven, and just let me watch. Bonus points if they have to share resources, or reluctantly open up. All the better if one of them is injured and needs looking after. (Caretaking! Another micro-trope I fall for every time.)

Only One Bed
Look. It's a classic for a reason. Whether it's awkward bed-sharing full of “we’re definitely not touching” tension or the inevitable snuggling that definitely doesn't mean anything (until it does), I eat it up every single time.

Small Town Romance
There's something about the slower pace, the community vibes, the way people keep running into each other all over town. Maybe one of them is just passing through. Maybe they went to school together and haven’t seen each other in years. Maybe the town itself becomes a character. I love it all. Bonus if there’s a grumpy x sunshine and only one bed in the inn.

And here’s the weird bit: the tropes I love to read aren’t always the ones I love to write. Like, I adore fake dating on the page, but I almost never write it. Same with small town settings - I’ll devour them in books, but when I try to write them, I bounce right off. Meanwhile, I find myself writing intense, emotional dynamics or complicated power shifts, even when I’m not actively looking for those as a reader. Isn’t that odd? Not in a bad way, just... interesting. Like there’s a different part of my brain at work when I write, with its own set of fixations and fascinations.

Anyway. I could probably keep going (mutual pining! found family! hurt/comfort! age gap! power imbalance! kink!), but I’ll stop before this turns into a novella. What about you—what are the tropes you can never resist? And are they the same ones you end up writing?

In paperback, this makes a thick graphic novel worthy of the name. The greyscale art is simple but expressive, and you quickly get a feel for Mags and her Abuela and their small desert town near Joshua Tree. Mag's childhood friend is back in town with her cowboy boots and pinhole camera and stirring up feelings that Mags can't let herself have because she's tied to her home and the secret in the basement that's bleeding her dry.

A tender story about learning to love yourself so you can accept the love others have for you. The art's limited use of color highlights childhood memories and photographs, but comes out in full force for the happy ending.

Contains: butch/transfem romance; death of a grandparent; and, separate from the romance: infidelity, stalking, emotional manipulation, threats of suicide, gun violence.

Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale...

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

In a city with over a million people per square kilometre, real estate firms will never lack for clients. Good news for the employees of the Wong Loi Realty Company!


Kowloon Generic Romance, volume 1 by Jun Mayuzuki (Translated by Amanda Haley)

On account of half the members of my dad's book group not being able to make it in person tonight, the other half decided they might as well all meet remotely. No cake this month. Thankfully, I got the call about it before warming the butter. Now I've got some under-ripe tomatoes that were going to go into a streusel cake and some red and black raspberries that I was planning on using as a backup in case the tomatoes were too ripe for the cake. I'll probably cook with the tomatoes and either eat or freeze the berries.

The usual receptionist is recovered enough she might be in next week, though it's still too soon to say for sure, and even if she's in, whether she'll be up to her full or operating at a reduced capacity. It's certainly pointing to an end stage of the gig, which somehow has me enjoying it more. The inability or the difficulty to savor the indefinite, I suppose. Something along those lines.

A couple weeks ago we went out to Shi Miao Dao Noodle House, which for the last year-or-two occupied the location of the rather lovely Japanese joint next to my favorite Vietnamese, An Loi. They also go by "Ten Seconds", which I believe their name translates to.

What they do is a bowl of broth into which you throw many things, but all of their broths are either spicy or porky or tomatoey, so I hadn't tried to make the time. Well, they do have other things, and I decided to go for dumplings and supplement them with a rice ball. Spouse went for a tomato-broth soup, and reviewed it favorably, and the spicy soupy things our friends had also hit the spot with them.

Me, I was a bit less lucky: as everyone else was served I got a question instead: did you order the chicken mushroom dumplings, but instead I made chicken soup dumplings, is that ok? I can't say it was necessarily thrilling, but I didn't exactly want to wait for a whole nother batch, so I went for them. And they were entirely ok. I also got the rice ball described as "shu mai" (shrimp); the shrimp was chopped into small enough bits that little texture remained, and the texture of the rice ball made me feel like it had sat for a while. (A couple days later I picked up a very similar rice ball from the deli counter at Lotte supermarket, and it was superior in nearly every way.)

We split an order of milk buns for dessert, and those were just fine.

It took rather longer than 10 seconds, but I would go back, if only to try the thing I actually ordered. Though maybe with a different second thing.

When last October The Big Greek Cafe first came to town (to replace the excellent Madrid tapas place, sigh) we attended its grand opening and won a door prize in the form of a gift card. (Then we forgot about it for a while.) We split a trio of appetizers - falafel for Spouse (which came with a bonus salad), calamari for me (with pita), and spanakopita to split. The first two came with containers of very dense tzatziki, and each was a perfectly adequate example. The spanakopita was, nicely, a rather sizeable mini-pie of it, rather than a slice of a larger sheet; I think I prefer this presentation, and it was a good size to round out the meal. All in all, a pleasant enough outing, though I don't know that I'd prioritize returning to it.

Probably because it has been weeks since I slept more than a couple of hours a night and months since I had what would be medically termed a good night's sleep, I spent at least ten hours last night unconscious enough to dream and it was amazing. Under ideal circumstances I would devote my afternoon to reading on the front steps until the thunderstorms arrive. Under the resentful circumstances of realism I have already devoted considerable of my afternoon to phone calls with doctors and will need to enact capitalism while I have the concentration for it. I may still try to take a walk. I have a sort of pressure headache of movies I managed to watch before I ran completely out of time and would like to talk about even in shallow and unsatisfactory ways. I heard Kaleo's "Way Down We Go" (2015) on WERS and am delighted that the video was shot in the dormant volcano Þríhnúkagígur. I will associate it with earthquake-bound Loki. My brain thought it should dream about nonexistent Alan Garner and what I very much doubt will be the second season of Murderbot (2025–).

[edit] Taking a walk informed me that the sidewalk of the street at the bottom of our street has been spray-painted with a swastika, visible efforts to scrub it out notwithstanding. The sentiment is far from shocking, but the placement is rather literally close to home.

I have not, as yet, managed to find any work for over the summer, and am now slightly doubtful whether I'm going to be able to at all - it's quite rare for a contract to be shorter than a couple of months, so unless I get something starting in the next couple of weeks I'm probably not going to have enough availability.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, if I don't have any income at all this year, then my savings will be pretty much entirely exhausted by the end of the year. On the other hand, I am quite enjoying being a gentleman of leisure...

Ellie is a Lipan Apache teenager in a world where magic, vampires, ghosts, and so forth are known to be real. She’s inherited the family gift for raising ghosts, though she only raises animals; human ghosts always come back wrong, and she’s happy with the companionship of her beloved ghost dog Kirby, not to mention her pet ghost trilobite. But when her cousin, who supposedly died in a car crash, returns in a dream to tell her he was murdered, she finds that knowing who killed him isn’t as helpful as one might imagine…

Ellie’s cousin Trevor told her the name of his killer, Abe Allerton from Willowbee, but he didn’t know why or how he was killed. Ellie enlists her best friend, Jay, a cheerleader with just enough fairy blood to give him pointy ears and the ability to make small lights. More importantly, he’s good at research. They learn that Willowbee is in Texas, near the town where Trevor lived with his wife, Lenore, and their baby. Jay brings in help: his older sister’s fiancé, Al, who’s a vampire.
All of them, plus Ellie’s parents and a ghost mammoth belonging to her grandmother, play a part in the effort to solve the mystery of Trevor’s death and bring his murderer to justice. And so, in a sense, will a major character who’s long dead (and not a ghost) but who’s a big presence in Ellie’s life: Six-Grand, her great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, the last person to have a gift as powerful as Ellie’s… and who vanished forever into the underworld.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mean, come on. GHOST TRILOBITE. GHOST MAMMOTH. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s heartfelt, it has lovely chapter heading illustrations, and it’s got some gorgeous imagery - I particularly loved a scene where the world transforms into an oceanic underworld, and Ellie sees a pod of whales swimming in the sky of a suburban neighborhood.

It's marketed as young adult and Ellie is seventeen, but the book feels younger (and so does Ellie.) I'd have no qualms handing it to an advanced nine-year-old reader, but it also appeals to adult me who misses the time when "urban fantasy" meant "our world, but with ghosts, elves, and so forth."

 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

 

I love planetary settlement novels, and I love alien communication novels, and Cam has given us both. When John Maraintha arrives on the planet Scythia, he has no particular intentions toward its inhabitants. It was never his intention to be there, and now that he is, he expects to serve as a doctor for the colonists. But he's simultaneously shut out of some parts of Scythian society and drawn into the puzzle of its sentient species and their communications. Their life cycles are so different from humans', but surely this gap can be bridged with goodwill and hard work, even in the scrubby high desert that serves as home for human and alien alike?

 

Science fiction famously touts itself as the literature of alienation; Cameron actually delivers on that here in ways that a lot of the genre is not even trying to do. The layers of alienation--and the layers of connection that can be found between them--are varied and complicated. This book is gentle and subtle, even though there are scenes were John's medical training is put to its bloodiest use. If you're tired of mid-air punching battles as the climax of far too many things, the very personal and very cultural staged climax of What We Are Seeking will be a canteen of water for you in this arid time. Gender, relationship, reproduction, and love mix and mingle in their various forms, some familiar and some new. I expect to be talking about this one for a long time after, and I can't wait for you to be able to join me in that.

Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is another of the novellas featuring Cleric Chih and their astonishing memory bird Almost Brilliant, although Almost Brilliant does not get a lot of page time this go-round. This is mainly the story of hunger, desperation, shame, and unquiet ghosts. It's about what depths people might sink to when famine comes--in this story, a famine demon, personified, but the shape of the story won't be unfamiliar if you've read about more mundane famines.

The lines between horror and dark fantasy are as always unclear, but wherever you place A Mouthful of Dust, I recommend only reading it when you're fully prepared for something unrelentingly bleak.

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not a stand-alone book. It's a close sequel to Witch King, and the characters and their situation are more thoroughly introduced in that volume. Unless you're a forgetful reader or specifically like to reread whole series when new installments come out, I think Wells gives you enough grounding to just pick this one up, but not enough for this to stand alone--it's not intended to.

If I had had to pick the title of this book, the word "alliances" would have figured heavily in it. I get that the two titles pair well this way, but this is a book substantially about dealing with one's allies--the ones who are definitely, definitely not friends as well as the ones Kai loves dearly who are not actually as reliable as he might have hoped. The other enemies of Hierarchy are not all immediately eager to team up with an actual demon; some of them require convincing that the enemy of their enemy really is their friend (VALID, because that is not a universally true thing). And of course Kai's own nearest and dearest are growing as people and have the growing pains associated with that. If you enjoyed Witch King, you're in for a treat as this is very much a continuation of all the things it was doing.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This was slight in the way Scalzi's books often are- he has good storytelling instincts but a reluctance to deeply interrogate his premises.

This has a similar premise to Hench, which I panned as 'morally bewildering.' The moral stakes are much clearer here, which made it easier to enjoy. Our hero inherits the family business, which his late uncle explicitly identifies as supervillainy, but the book doesn't expect you to sympathize with the ideology of supervillainy, merely the poor sadsack protagonist who must navigate this murky world and try to figure out where his own lines are drawn and how to make it out alive.

Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

Continuing on the theme. This was pitched as The Office in a supervillain's fortress, and it mostly fits the brief, albeit laden down with a slow burn romance between the villain and his personal assistant that I could have done without.

Here there is no question that we are supposed to understand the villain as a Robin Hood standing up to an oppressive king, but that supposed to is doing a lot of work. Maehrer seems caught between prongs of her scenario- for Evie's defection to the villain to be a source of angst and happening at risk of communal alienation, the king needs to be popular in her village. For her to have the moral clarity and belief in her mission required to be an effective assistant to the villain, the king needs to be transparently a tyrant. Splitting the middle here doesn't quite land. I kept waiting for the substantive reasons for Evie's rejection of the king's law to become clearer, but probably we are just supposed to read it as the evolving consequences of her growing love for the villain rather than any sort of political awakening.

That said, the handling of the evil office politics is a delight and I particularly enjoyed a baffling set of small details about 'the interns' because Maehrer never explains why a secret lair has interns, just has them be there and causing trouble in the background. This book made me laugh and that's worth a lot.

Arrogant traffic analyst Boyd Hakluyt is just a pawn in the struggle for Ciudad de Vados' future.

The Squares of the City by John Brunner

Whoops, I completely forgot to mention in my last post that there was a Friday the 13th tattoo related flash and I wrote an Iron Triangle triple drabble for it: As Evening Slowly Slides Into Night. Summary: An evening, like many others, for the Iron Triangle. (And their shared big bed.)

The Hurt/Comfort exchange has (finally) opened! Lots of fandoms to peruse here. Authors will be revealed on the 11th. I got great Guardian art and a fic for The First Shot and, as always, there's just a ton of amazing things in the collection.

Battleship hit its signup cap within 36 hours of opening so now it's just a random prompt period for a few more days until teams are assigned and then it actually starts on the 12th I think. If you want the chance of getting stuff created (fic, art or podfic) for you, prompting is open to anyone. As prompting is a bit complicated, a few different people have written up guides on how to do it: guide #1, guide #2, and guide #3. All are tumblr posts but I checked them in a private tab and they all work when not signed into tumblr. You might not get anything, but, then again, you might so feel free to peruse the tagset (also linked in all the tumblr posts) and see if there's some fandoms and a few freeform additional tags (500+ ranging from the most E rated things to very, very G) that catch your eye and consider throwing in a prompt or two (or 50, the max).

I've only done 11 prompts so far and haven't decided if I want to do more or not. I tend to keep mine pretty simple as I find my eyes glaze over at huge walls of tags so I pick 10-20 and leave it at that with a few comments in the prompt box along with my DNWs but everyone does it differently. If you want to prompt and have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

Well into the ramp up of this year's Battleship it randomly changed its rules to no longer accept crochet art. I'd already started planning a project to fulfill the 'battlesheep' additional tag and decided to finish it anyway. Behold the 'fearsome' (major use of airquotes there) Battlesheep!! (And I now make up 12.7% of AO3's entire crochet tag between my main and birthday bash account.)

I still haven't gotten any of the links from Pocket posted to any of my research link posts, I really need to start working on that. Ugh. So much to do, so little time.

Last but not least, a single recthething fic rec (MDZS/Untamed):

Burn with the sun, die with the sun (series). Summary: A collection of works in which Wen Xu picks Wei Wuxian off Yiling's streets and makes him an integral part of the Wen Sect. (An interesting AU series where shortly after getting his sword WWX is sort of thrown out of the Jiang/Madam Yu sends him to Yiling and tells him he can't return until he's tamed the Burial Mounds but after saving Wen Xu's life there he is taken in by the Wen, currently 3 works, 21k total)

I'll be working this week, and possibly in the foreseeable future as well. It's hard to say - the woman I'm sitting in for needed emergency surgery to have her gallbladder removed, and organ removal always constitutes a careful recovery period.

I don't know how long I want to do this. Full-time, at least. It's the gnawing nighttime feeling and the looming mornings that are getting to me more than lost afternoons at the gym and visits to farmers' markets. Having less time to get my daily living activities finished so I can get writing done in the evening. I'm sure there's a knack to it I can pick up with practice. Breaking the weights out for some evening workouts is something I'm out of practice doing, but I'm getting back into easily enough. I can't drop and do twenty pushups straight, and I'm still capable of a few with good form, so I'll hitch myself back to that goal, among others. Something achievable.

In the appendices of Alzina Stone Dale's 1984 edition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St. Clare Byrne's Busman's Honeymoon (1936), reproduced for the first time from a handwritten sheet by Sayers with an additional scribble from Byrne, I have found perhaps the greatest production note I have read in a playscript in my life:

Warning

The murder contrivance in Act III Scene 2 will not work properly unless it is sufficiently weighted. It is therefore GENUINELY DEADLY.

Producers are earnestly requested to see that the beam, chain & attachments & the clearance above the head of the actor playing CRUTCHLEY are thoroughly tested at every performance immediately before the beginning of the Scene, in order to avoid a POSSIBLY FATAL ACCIDENT.

How is it that in this our era of infinite meta when See How They Run (2022) was a real film that came out in theaters and not someone's especially clever Yuletide treat no Sayers fan has ever worked this note into a fictional production of Busman's Honeymoon where the blasphemed aspidistra exacted a worse revenge than corroded soot? I don't want to write it, I'm just amazed no one's taken advantage of it. I wouldn't mind knowing either if the 1988 revival with Edward Petherbridge and Emily Richards found a way of reproducing the effect without risking their Crutchley, since Byrne's "Note to Producers" describes the stage trick in technical detail down to the supplier of the globes for the lamp and she still agreed with Sayers—she wanted the warning inserted before the relevant scene in the acting edition—that it could wreck an actor if not set up with belt-and-braces care. Otherwise I am most entertained so far that according to Dale, while the collaboration between the two women was much more mutual than an author and her beta-reader, Byrne characteristically put in the stage business and directions which it seems Sayers was less inclined to write than dialogue. This same edition includes Sayers' solo-penned and previously unpublished Love All (1941) and testifies to the further treasury of the Malden Public Library, whose poetry section when we were directed to it turned out to be a miscellany of anthologies, plays, and biographies shading into what used to be shelved as world literature. I have three more Christies for my mother, another unfamiliar Elizabeth Goudge, another unfamiliar Elleston Trevor, some nonfiction on an angle of women's war work and the Battle of the Atlantic that I actually know nothing about, and the summer play of Christopher Fry's seasonal quartet. I am running on about a fifth of a neuron at this point, but rushthatspeaks bought me ice cream.

I... am still processing that Sinner v Dimitrov match. My heart is breaking for Grigor and no lie when he went down clutching his chest, both Li and I thought for a horrible horrible moment that he was having a fucking heart attack.

Genuinely thought he was gonna beat Jannik. And I was fucking gutted for that. But that is nothing like where I expected that match to go. Poor Grisha 😭

✨glimmers and good things – day 5 ✨
three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today

💇‍♀️ I received some really lovely comments about my hair today - it felt nice to be seen like that.

💌 A friend was at the Sinner v Dimitrov game, and sent me a gorgeous pic of Darren & Simone they took because they knew I’d love it - such a thoughtful surprise.

🥪 Made myself a thunder & lightning sandwich with clotted cream from the fridge - simple, indulgent, and exactly what I needed.

That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛
Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.

Everything you need for your own GURPS 4E tabletop roleplaying campaign.

Bundle of Holding: GURPS 4E Essentials (from 2022)




Volume 3 (Nov 2008 - Dec 2018) of Pyramid, the Steve Jackson Games magazine for tabletop roleplaying gamers. Sixty issues and more!

Bundle of Holding: Pyramid 1

Why wait around for the throne or the cash when murder can deliver it immediately?

Five Dangerously Impatient Heirs and Successors

a dragonfly
unable to settle
on the grass
     -1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

2004: Labour spares no effort to liberate Britons from human rights, UKIP's electoral successes surely do not reflect fundamental flaws in the British psyche, and London voters are heartbroken to discover the Livingstone who was just elected mayor isn’t the Livingstone who co-wrote the Fighting Fantasy books.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.


Which 2004 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Coalescent by Stephen Baxter
Darwin's Children by Greg Bear
Maul by Tricia Sullivan
Midnight Lamp by Gwyneth Jones
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.

today was a hard one. everything felt heavy and off-kilter, and finding glimmers wasn’t easy — but it felt important. small anchors, even if they’re a little wobbly.

🛏️ I had a proper lie-in this morning. Didn’t rush, didn’t feel guilty. Just let myself rest, and it felt right.

🍃 My Isabelle plushie was soft and solid and there when I needed grounding during a panic attack. Small comfort, big anchor.

📝 Coming back to blogging has felt really good — like reclaiming a piece of myself. Even better, I’ve been getting some lovely comments that have made me feel seen and appreciated.

That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛
Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.

Title: “I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you”
(still uncertain if I'm going to run out of plot bunnies or Taylor Swift lyrics for tennis rps fic - all but about 5 fics so far have her lyrics for titles)

Chapter 1 is already posted at https://archiveofourown.org/works/66563692

This one started because I fell asleep watching a booktuber absolutely eviscerate the worldbuilding in romantasy — like, full destruction with timestamps and citations - and dreamed up two booktubers who get into a feud over it. Duelling videos, increasingly petty reading challenges, and unsubtle one-star reviews. It was meant to be a joke, and then, of course, it turned into a slow burn.

Carlos is the chaotic romantasy lover with warm lighting and overexcited hand gestures.
Jannik is the dry fantasy purist who edits his videos like he’s building a cathedral.
Their video styles hate each other.
They are, obviously, soulmates.

It’s still early days - I've written and posted Jannik's opening video, I'm editing Carlos’ first response - but I’m having so much fun with the format. It’s another one where I’m playing with a different style: mixing prose with video transcripts, comment threads, DMs, and maybe even playlists later on. It feels like a multimedia fic without quite going full AO3 PowerPoint mode.

( this is a little snippet from chapter 2 )

Can the American King's uncanny military genius best an enemy so cunning the enemy loses every battle?

The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun by Christopher Anvil

I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.

three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today

💇‍♀️ Got my ( hair dyed magenta! ) Bright, bold, and very me — it’s always a bit of a transformation, and it felt good to see that vivid colour in the mirror again.

🎾 Jannik Sinner, Ben Shelton, Grigor Dimitrov, and Mirra Andreeva all won their Wimbledon matches today — every one of them brought something joyful to watch.

🍔 Takeout burgers for dinner. We were completely wiped — two hours at the hairdresser left us sore, dysregulated, and done. The burgers weren’t fancy, but they were warm and easy and enough.

That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛
Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.

Challenge #2
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

☀️ The Romance of Summer: A Love Letter to Tennis
When I saw the prompt What do you love? My first instinct was to be clever. Say something seasonal and tidy. Ice lollies. Sea air. The feeling of sunlight on your knees through the window. But the real answer is louder and messier and always true:

I love tennis.

Not just in summer. All year round. In slow January slogs and awkward 4 a.m. matches because they're in Australia. In rain delays and early exits. But in summer, on the clay at Roland Garros, on the grass at Wimbledon, it blooms. Everything gets bigger. Brighter. Louder. The highs hit higher. The heartbreaks sting sharper.

I love the weird rhythm of a tennis summer. The shift from clay to grass. The way I measure time by who’s still standing on a Friday afternoon. I love the ritual of it: cold drinks, strawberries & cream & prosecco, the particular way sunlight falls across the floor during a 5-setter I wasn’t planning to get invested in. I love the commentary, the chaos, and the wild narratives we build between matches. I love players who break my heart and players I can’t stop watching.

I love how tennis reminds me I still feel things at full volume. That I can cry over a match I knew they were going to lose. That I can believe, right until match point, that maybe this time it’ll be different.

Tennis is stupid and beautiful and exhausting and sometimes the only thing that cuts through the fog in my brain.

It doesn't always love me back. It overwhelms me. It distracts me. It makes me anxious and angry and euphoric and sleepless. But every season, every surface, I come back. I love it wildly. I love it anyway.

Every summer, I fall in love with it again. Even when I swear I won’t.

This is much easier for Martin's New Voices series....

( Read more... )

Four works new to me. One is SF, two fantasy, and the magazine (which I have not yet looked inside) likely both. Two of the novels are series novels, one does not seem to me.

Books Received, June 28 — July 4

It's Book Swap Day* at the library. Last time I was lucky and found both volumes of a book by one of my favourite authors. This time I came out with almost the whole Masters of Rome series plus a bonus one about Troy, all by Colleen McCullough. Only the last one is missing from the Masters of Rome series. I'm sure I can source that some other how when I get that far. There's a lot of text to get through first. I have never actually read anything by this author before, but hey, there's literally nothing to lose by not trying and if I don't like them, they can just go back again.


*This is awesome. They do it I think once a month. You can donate books you don't want anymore (there are a few exceptions that they don't want) and you can take any books that seem interesting to you. It doesn't cost anything and you don't have to bring a book to take a book. I've found some gold nuggets there! (And a few regrets. Last time I stupidly didn't take the full set of 1001 Nights. 16 volumes. I think they were even illustrated. I don't know what I was thinking)

On the normality front, our street is full of cracks and bangs and whooshes from fireworks set off around the neighborhood, none so far combustibly. Otherwise I spent this Fourth of July with my husbands and my parents and eleven leaves of milkweed on which the monarch seen fluttering around the yard this afternoon had left her progeny. My hair still smells like grill smoke. Due to the size of one of the hamburgers, I folded it over into a double-decker with cheese and avocado and chipotle mayo and regret nothing about the hipster Dagwood sandwich. A quantity of peach pie and strawberries and cream were highlights of the dessert after a walk into the Great Meadows where the black water had risen under the boardwalk and the water lilies were growing in profusion from the last, droughtier time we had passed that way. I do not know the species of bird that has built a nest in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen, but the three eggs in it are dye-blue.

On the non-normality front, I meant it about the spite: watching my country stripped for parts for the cruelty of it, half remixed atrocities, half sprint into dystopia, however complicated the American definition has always been, right now it still means my family of queers and rootless cosmopolitans and as most of the holidays we observe assert, we are still here. It's peculiar. I was not raised to think of my nationality as an important part of myself so much as an accident of history, much like the chain of immigrations and migrations that led to my birth in Boston. I was raised to carry home with me, not locate it in geography. I've been asked my whole life where I really come from. This administration in both its nameless rounds has managed to make me territorial about my country beyond the mechanisms of its democracy whose guardrails turned out to be such movable goalposts. It enrages me to be expected not to care that I have seen the pendulum swing like a wrecking ball in my lifetime, as if the trajectory were so inevitable that it absolves the avarice to do harm or the cowardice to prevent it. It is nothing to do with statues. The door to the stranger is supposed to be open.

The wet meadows of the Great Meadows are peatlands. They were cut for fuel in the nineteenth century, the surrealism of fossil fuels: twelve thousand years after the glaciers, ashes in a night. The color of their smoke filled the air sixteen years ago when some of the dryer acres burned. If you ask me, there's room for bog bodies.

A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)

The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett) (2024): murder mystery in a secondary world empire where biological husbandry seems to have beat out chemical synthesis, also there are kaiju leviathans. It's likely the leviathans are linked to the bio-engineering in ways that are glossed over in this novel, from the shape of the this novel and what I know of the sequel. (Only one sequel so far.) The detective-apprentice duo namechecks Holmes and Watson, which is a crime-solving template whose use I'm neutral to dubious about seeing, but Ana and Din mostly stand on their own.

Cup has a pretty speech about "when the Empire is weak, it is often because a powerful few have denied us the abundance of our people," which is a nice summing-up of one of the major themes. (I am all for compelled offering of that abundance, but later.)

Worldbuilding, plot, and characterization very much in a Hugo tradition from the '90s or '00s. I'd put money on Cup getting high marks in some circles.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In (John Wiswell) (2024): "cozy horror", which is a new to me subgenre, where human-eating monster Shesheshen falls in love with a human. And also eats people.

I forgot about the bonkers body count until I tried to fill cahn in on the ending. So let's start there.

( Major plot spoilers. Also major theme spoilers. )

Since this won a Nebula, clearly I am missing something. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the baroque Wulfyre murder-hookup chart and how the precocial biology works when I'm supposed to be getting "they're all monsters, we're all monsters, monstrous is as monstrous does" as the message and moving on. Am I just supposed to assume "Bloodchild" is in the DNA and move on? I am so baffled.

Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky) (2024): DNF. I started the audiobook, I stopped one sentence in. I tried the ebook, I stopped two sentences in. I did not have a good time slogging through Alien Clay and a survey of reviews tells me I'm not doing that to myself again.

The recurring theme of the 2025 Hugos (so far) seems to be people using other human beings as depersonalized tools. Literal robots (Service Model); totalitarians ship people off to labor camps (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay); mother uses daughter as abused pawn in her avaricious plots (T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes To Call); ditto Someone To Build A Nest In; The Ministry of Time going full spy-thriller tropes; to a lesser extent Din's apprenticeship with Ana in The Tainted Cup, but since there's a big empire, a murder investigation, elective (or "elective"?) biological modification of imperial subjects, and city-destroying toxic monsters periodically attacking, I am willing to read on in the suspicion someone is using someone horribly as their tool.

Quick ETA: Cup audiobook narrated by Andrew Fallaize, Nest audiobook narrated by Carmen Rose. When googling "someone you can build a nest in audiobook", the second hit is libro.fm, visible content An adorable romance of people falling in love for the first time set in a wonderful fantasy world, this book is perfect for you! ...wow.

Kaval Park, a full-length documentary about Alexander Eppler, an extraordinary American musician who specialized in Balkan instruments, including the shepherd's flute known as a kaval. He lived in Seattle, and the documentary includes other Balkan dancers and instrumentalists from the community there, as well as interviews with Bulgarians who knew him. I don't often watch movies, and this was fascinating. He went to Bulgaria by himself when he was 14 years old to learn kaval, while it was still a closed communist country!

Queer Dating Apps: Beware Who You Trust With Your Intimate Data by Em, staff writer for Privacy Guides. A thorough analysis, with the depressing conclusion that none of the dating apps are trustworthy with your private data, and suggestions for how to protect yourself if you use them anyway.

I've been wanting to get better at noticing the small, good things in my days, especially the quiet ones that are easy to miss when I'm overwhelmed, in pain, or just having a rough brain day. I keep going back to 3_good_things_a_day but figured I'd share them here too.

So this is me, starting a little series called glimmers and good things: three things each day (or as close to daily as I can manage) that made me smile, feel seen, feel safe, or feel a tiny spark of joy.
They won’t always be profound. Sometimes they’ll be “I had a nice sandwich” or “Carlos Alcaraz didn’t destroy my soul today.” But they’ll be real, and I want to keep track of them.

three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today
🧡 Someone sent me a gorgeous pic of ( Darren & Simone ) they found online because they knew I’d love it and wanted to make sure I’d seen it. It made me feel so known.

📚 Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant Tumblr reblogged my review of Rolling in the Deep (!!) and I am still quietly screaming about it.

🍕 Friday night comforts: pizza, mango Pepsi Max, Nutella ice cream, and Carlos Alcaraz winning his 3rd round match against Struff. We feast. 🎾💛

That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛
Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.