Reading

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you asked for my Hugo opinions

Here we go! It's gonna be long though.

You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.

Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.

I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.

It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.

( opinions )

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The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens

13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.

Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...

...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?

Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.

Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.

But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.

The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!

The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.

The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.

Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.

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An idea for how to keep people's love of reading into adulthood.

I think, instead of being forced to do assigned reading in school, which tends to make people end up as adults who never read, teachers should alternate between two options:

1. Give students a curated list of books from which they can choose to read and do book reports that focus on giving their honest opinions of the books, guided by a list of suggestions for things to talk about. Did you like the book? What did you like about it, if anything? What did you dislike? Did you dislike one or more of the characters? Something about the plot? What critiques and/or praise would you give the author? What suggestions would you give the author? Did you connect with / relate to any of the themes of the book? Did you relate to any of the struggles or joys of any of the characters? Etc etc. (Encouraging the students to think about what they're reading.)

2. Same as above, except this time with books of the student's choosing from anywhere -- libraries, personal collections, web fiction, fanfic, etc. These would also have suggestions for the students to try to convince others that their book of choice is good literature worth reading, and if they hype up the book well enough, the book stands a good chance of being added to the curated list mentioned in option number 1.

I especially think this is important because academics tend to have these insular ideas of what counts as good literature and what doesn't, ideas that usually end up mostly promoting dead old white men with books that are so old that the modern reader struggles to read them -- even the readers who enjoy reading books like that.

That tendency of academics, including teachers, having such insular notions of what constitutes good literature also excludes a lot of not just modern literature in general but entire genres like science fiction, and also excludes a lot of minorities like LGBT folks and black people, indigenous people, and others.

I don't think doing things this way is going to be very quick at getting that kind of conservative, classist, and racist insularism out of academia in general and especially the upper echelons of academia, but I think it's very important that we introduce this technique into public schools as a requirement for at least the middle school and high school levels of English class to kind of counterbalance these insular attitudes as they've been taught to the teachers, and introduce children to this technique before they can have their love of reading beaten out of them by the more rigid and outdated white patriarchal system. It would also serve the function of introducing that broader spectrum of literature and appreciation for it to future teachers at a young age.

Oh, and of course it would also serve a much needed broadening of students' perspectives about the world in general at an early age which can only be good for the country especially when it comes to discouraging racism and fascism. Especially so if you alternate the curated lists for option number one to include various themes that would help broaden students' perspectives.

Like for instance: yes, there is "The Grapes of Wrath," but under that book's themes of poverty, classism, the failures of capitalism, etc, there are likely other books that may be more accessible to younger readers and readers of the modern era that might eventually lead them to want to read "The Grapes of Wrath" instead of it being forced on them. And it's so very much easier to learn something when you are interested in it, and it's entertaining or at least engaging, than it is when you're being forced to do something.

For instance, "The Murderbot Diaries" series by Martha Wells has very strong anti-capitalist themes to it, but it's also really fun, really funny, and very entertaining. Or how something like "The West Side Story" could get kids interested in the story of Romeo and Juliet.

I say all this not just because the US education system is churning out a lot of students that once used to love reading and now only read if they absolutely have to, but also because even though I never lost my love of reading, I still hated virtually everything that the English teachers forced on us. Occasionally these books turned out to be pretty decent, but more often than not I just had no interest in any of those books, they were waaayyy too much effort to get through, and in retrospect I was able to see how if even someone who loves to read can struggle that much with the assigned reading, that it's really no wonder so many other students are just getting so fed up with that bullshit that they just give up on reading entirely, and I think this plan of mine that I've laid out in this post would go a long way towards fixing that. It wouldn't take care of it entirely because there is a lot of other reading required in academia, but I think the above technique paired with a great reduction in the homework would be a really good combo, especially since study after study after study has shown that homework doesn't really help with anything, it's mostly not merely useless, but actively counterproductive. It's mostly just busy work that accomplishes nothing but creating burnout in students, and is a function of the capitalist desire to forge students into good little worker robots.

But that attitude of turning students into worker robots is severely outdated, since that was started at the height of the US's manufacturing industry, which doesn't really exist anymore in the information age. So that is not the world we live in anymore, and what we really need in the world is for people to be as intelligent as they can be, as flexible and open-minded as can be, as creative as can be, and with a willingness (and even love) to read even into adulthood. So very many things about modern society could be fixed if people would actually take the time and effort to read and to be able to do it well, with the time and effort they take being willing enough on their part that it is just a habit and not something people have to force themselves to do. Which can only happen if we find some way to teach literature in a way that retains people's love of reading.

This is of course only one small part of the problem and one small solution for that part, because just everything about Western education standards beats the creativity and desire to learn about the world out of children, and a great many of them just never recover from that. But I don't want to write an entire book about this on here, so that's all for now.

Current Mood: angry

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Censorship on Bluesky

As it turns out, BlueSky is worse about censorship than Facebook is. After a couple hours of reblogging things on BlueSky and making the occasional text post today, I made a text post saying to punch Nazis and ICE agents, and as a result, I got an email saying the post was being removed. A bit ridiculous, but if it had been just that one post, I'd have understood. But when I went back to my profile page, everything I had posted for the past 17 hours was gone.

I. Am. PISSED! Even Facebook never took down dozens of posts because of one single mistake on one single post!

And on a first offense, no less!

I want to strangle the assholes who did that! Or more likely, given the speed it happened at, strangle the assholes who programmed the AI moderator. And then kick them in the gonads with sharpened cleats on for good measure!

Current Location: Ташкент, Узбекистан

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И ещё один пост из рубрики «Ночные тени»

Итак, вот вам ещё один пост с ночными тенями. Надеюсь, вам ещё не надоело. Вообще-то у нас здесь пик жары уже прошёл, так что скоро у меня тут вновь начнут преобладать дневные фото.

Снято в махалле, совсем рядом с нашим домом.

( Смотреть ещё )

А следующий пост будет про звёзды.

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organisation

on organisation, and notes

Having now acquired a uni laptop for study, I'm handling the different parts of my life better. One of the things that I'm really starting to embrace is Obsidian.

After a couple of false starts, I've moved my daily journalling there--I've created a template, and literally the only thing I require of myself each day is that I click the button that generates the daily note. Some days I don't do more than that, but as the template has a couple of verb tags, I come back afterwards and revisit. So far I mostly haven't been adding any details, but I am copying my 750 words in there, and if then afterwards at some point I will read through those (tag: to-do/tidy) and see whether anything resonates. This is a deliberately asynchronous process, because dumping the everything is cathartic, and I won't know what is going to resonate.

One of the interesting things is that I'm capturing bits and bobs of ideas, and not really worrying about where they go. It is possible that I'll never look at them again, and that is okay. but it is also possible that at some point I'll do a search on a word, see the set of things, and make a map of content. This is not a curated garden, this is a bushland with paths.

But! it means that I have draft blog posts that I remember to go and look at, because I have tagged them as blog/draft, and thus I have successfully separated out 'I have a thing I want to write' from 'dealing with posting'. Which is probably going to mean that things will be posted in clumps (this post is going straight into the editor, which is not the current normal).

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book lists

reading lists (2025-07-04)

from the drafts archive

Bookbub: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of Summer 2025 (Jeff Somers) - supposedly a 'curated' list; I saw a number of new to me authors. There were three that I'm lukewarm about and have added to the list, and the rest I was bored by the descriptions. I suspect this is part of an ongoing issue with the way that blurbs are written, as I'm increasingly uninterested

added

Infinite Archive (Mur Lafferty) - because it is book three in the series; and I'm interested in where it might go
Lucky Day (Chuck Tingle) - maybe
Hemlock and Silver (T Kingfisher)

Transfer orbit: 11 new books for July - unsurprisingly, some overlap with the previous list; the only one I could have added was already there from the above list.

Gizmodo: 82 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books Arriving in July - this is really too many books. I have skimmed, but wasn't committing to reading everything. Unsurprisingly, there are repeats. The blurbs here were shorter, and yet worse. I did add a couple to the list, but I'm a bit dubious. The Arthuriana one is intriguing, but book 3 of a series; the new Rivers of London one is of interest to Artisanat

added:

Arthur by Giles Kristian - book 3, but Arthurian
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

New Scientist: The best new science fiction books of July 2025 - some of the same books, with more interesting summaries. I am, however, a grouch, and added a single book to the 'maybe' list

maybe:

Circular Motion (Alex Foster)

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Tiny House, Big Fix, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Of the MANY bait-and-switch books I've been tricked into reading, this takes the prize for the biggest switch. The back cover says it's about a single mom carpenter who builds a tiny house for herself and her daughters to live in. The title is about tiny houses. There is a tiny house on the cover. I read the book because I thought it would be about building a tiny house.

The book is actually about the events leading up to her building the tiny house. She doesn't build the tiny house until the LAST CHAPTER. It takes up about four pages.

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Walking

Yesterday, I chose to leave uni at 4:30pm, because I had more than half an hours work of Stuff left to do (I did get it done, but later than planned; that is not the point of this post). Which meant that as I was nearing home, it was still a lovely bright day, and it wasn't raining.

so, instead of heading for the interchange, and hoping to make it for the other bus, I got off across the road from the shopping centre, with the intention to walk home (roughly 2km) through the suburb. Back up plan was that if this turned out to be a Bad Idea, I could call for pick up. Which was a possibility--I'd walked up to the Tavern for an afternoon catchup, which involves Too Many stairs, and only some of them have convenient (if tediously slow) lifts, each taking me a single floor. Which meant I'd used the cane to get there and back. And done a bit of stretching when I got back to the office to discover that I was the last one in, and someone had turned the lights out.

But! back to the walk home. Lovely day, peaceful opportunity. I resisted the nearly overwhelming temptation to pull out my phone and my headphones, and put on a podcast in order to spend the time productively. Instead, the goal was to exist, in space, with no task but to be in the moment.

And it was lovely.

I spotted a lot of flowers--a daffodil, some white bulbs that I should recognise and don't, azaleas and/or camellias (really need a refresher on those), grevillia, something pretty in purple, and many that I admired and don't recall.

Someone's mulberry is already fruiting, with tiny green fruits the size of my smallest fingernail covering it enough to look like leaves.

A house has vanished, to be replaced by a concrete pad that doesn't look large enough, so I'm wondering whether it will be two stories. A front garden has vanished, leaving grey sand to blow away.

I watched two buses go past--the one I might have caught, from too far down the side street to hear it, and one the other way thundering past as I was nearly home.

I stopped to take a photo of gum nuts (proper gumnuts, I might remember to post that and explain why).

I wandered past the tennis courts at the school where two adults and two kids were split up teaching the kids variously to hit a tennis ball with what looked like a totem tennis bat, and to ride a bike with trainer wheels. Just past there were a pair of tweens with a football, trying something fancy, based on the general behaviour.

It wasn't warm, and I was glad for my jumper, but there wasn't much wind. As I walked, the probably muscles in my right leg slowly untangled, and I went from unsure about this as an idea, through 'just another bit, then I'll know' into 'oh, actually, this is pretty good'.

I managed mindfulness for a reasonable amount of the walk. I did get a bit bored and grumpy at myself, and lost the meditative feel when I was about five minutes from home, which was coincidentally about a minute before Artisanat messaged to see where I was at and whether I was wanting a lift from the station. But at that point there was little point in asking for a lift, so I stomped on home.

I don't mind walking, but I'm dreadful at doing it recreationally. This, where it was a necessary path between where I was and where I wished to be, is a good compromise, but finding the spaces in my life where it fits is challenging. As the days get longer, I hope I'll remember that this is a net positive to deal with the pain, and that the more I walk, the more I can walk.

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Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

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podcasts

podcast friday

Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.

* Don't.

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Hominids, by Robert Sawyer

A Neanderthal from an alternate universe where Homo Sapiens went extinct and Neanderthals lived into the present day is sucked into our world due to an experiment gone wrong. The book follows his interactions with humans in one storyline, and the repercussions in Neanderthal World in another.

I picked up this book because I like Neanderthals and alternate dimensions that aren't about relatively recent history (ie, not about "What if Nazis won WWII?"). The parts of the book that are actually about Neanderthal World are really fun. It's a genuinely different society, where men and women live separately for the most part, surveillance by implanted computers prevents most crime, mammoths and other large mammals did not go extinct, there are back scratching posts in homes, they wear special eating gloves rather than using utensils or eating barehanded, etc. This was all great.

The problem with this book was everything not directly about Neanderthal society. Bizarrely, this included almost the entire plotline on Neanderthal World, which consisted of a murder investigation and trial of the missing Neanderthal's male partner (what we would call his husband or lover), which was mostly tedious and ensured that we see very little of Neanderthal society. The Neanderthal interactions on our world were fun, but the non-Neanderthal parts were painful. There is a very graphic, on-page stranger rape of the main female character, solely so she can realize that Neanderthal dude is not like human men. There's two sequels, which I will not read.

It got some pretty entertaining reviews:

"☆☆☆☆☆1 out of 5 stars.
No. JUST NO.
I am sorry, but the premise of inherently and innately peaceful cultures with more advanced technology than conflict-driven cultures is patently absurd. Read Alistair Reynolds' Century Rain for an examination of how technological advancement depends on strife: necessity is the mother of invention, and the greatest necessity of all is fighting for survival. I will not be lectured for my male homosapien hubris by a creature that would never have gotten past the late neolithic in technology."

Hominids won a Hugo! Here are the other nominees.

1st place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
2nd place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)
3rd place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
4th place: The Scar by China Miéville (British)
5th place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)

Amazingly, I have read or attempted to read all of them. My ratings:

1st place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
2nd place: The Scar by China Miéville (British).
3rd place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)
4th place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
5th place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)

If I'd voted, it would be very close between Bones of the Earth and The Scar, both of which I loved. I made a valiant attempt at The Years of Rice and Salt. Like all of KSR's books, I'm sure it's quite good but not for me. I know I read Kiln People but recall literally nothing about it, so I'll give Hominids a place above it for having some nice Neanderthal stuff.

The actual ballot is a complete embarrassment.

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The Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

( Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.

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The National Guard in DC

I no longer live in the District of Columbia. But, in more ways than I can say, the District is home. The District in my opinion (and per my vote in 2016) deserves statehood. I hope in my lifetime to read about the election for the first governor of Douglass Commonwealth.

The President's imposition of martial law -- which is what using military for police functions is -- in the District is made possible by racism. DC is majority-minority. Although the black population is below 50% of the total these days, the white population is still under 40% of the total population of the District.

As a former Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (an unpaid, non-partisan, local elected position), I can tell you that the crime rate went up during the 2008-10 recession, but was still nowhere near the rates found from 1975-1995. Violent crimes have continued to decrease. Robbery and theft go up when unemployment goes up, but the overall rates are still low. Rarely are tourists affected by any crime, though there was a spate of purse snatchings in the early 2010s.

What Trump and his supporters detest is the fact that most DC police are black. It's a disconnect for them. For too many, black=criminal and white=police. By calling in the National Guard and the other police forces associated with the District (Capitol Police, Metro Police, the US Marshalls, FBI Police...), Trump is attempting to make the optics match his expectations. There are indications that New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Oakland (all of which have minority mayors, all of which are in states whose electoral votes went to his opponents) will probably be next if he gets away with it in DC.

The President also resents that DC's electoral votes have gone to his opponents in all three elections. Even people who loathed Hillary Clinton voted for her in DC because we recognized that she was a fundamentally serious person and our current president is not.

I am asking everyone to call or email their Senators (or Congress people) and object to this blatant misuse of the military. If you can object as a veteran who recognizes that this isn't the military's purview, that's great. If you want to object on Constitutional lines, before DC had home rule, Congress -- mostly the Senate -- had the right of rule over the District of Columbia. Even Republican Senators should be willing to guard their own rights to shape and control the District. That power has never really belonged to the Executive.

For anyone who's interested, DC voted in favor of statehood in a 2016 referendum. Among other items, it gave us the potential future name of Douglass Commonwealth so that we could retain DC for postal services. If you think we're too small, by area to be a state, we're larger than the three smallest countries in the world. If you think we lack population, we have more people than Vermont or Wyoming, and we're within spitting distance of Alaska.

Overall, DC paid income tax of $45,243,625 (in thousands of dollars) in Fiscal 2024. North Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, and Puerto Rico combined paid income tax of $44,810,347 (in thousands of dollars). The District of Columbia deserves a say in how U.S. tax dollars are spent.

Please call your Senators and/or Representative to object to the deployment of the National Guard in DC.

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I went to art school semi-on-purpose. Which is to say I always loved art, loved drawing, but was it my passion? Who knows what a 13-year-old's passion is? I was nerdier about other things. But I was bullied in grade school and wanted only to get away from my tormentors when I finally graduated, and so I auditioned for the art school as an escape. I was good at drawing, good enough that they plucked me out of my boring town and away from everyone I hated. There I had teachers who truly were passionate about art, and art history, and I fell in love with not just the paintings and sculpture and architecture but the stories and personalities behind them. We scrimped and saved so that I could go on the school trip to Italy and there I got to see the art, and fall in love with Florence in particular, and walk in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and it was the most incredible thing to happen to me in my life thus far.

So anyway reading this book was like reliving that, only—as Ada Palmer says throughout the book—"Ever-So-Much-But-More-So." Because there is more history than I knew, or learned since, more stories, more people, about 100 pages of footnotes, and it's contested history, histories complicated by someone who loves this era even more than I do. Despite the book's heft, it's a very fast read. Also I cried a l'il. Fight me. But read it.

Currently reading: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a re-read of my favourite SM-G book For Reasons and my God, Meche is even worse than I remembered. I love her. Ahaha. What a nightmare child.

Current Mood: sad

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I made myself sad again.

YouTube video: What event in your life still messes with you to this day? | Askreddit

I left this comment there:

My best friend ever, who I was in an on-again, off-again romance with because it took me ages to realize I'm basically asexual, died in 2019. I've never been the same since. I already had chronic depression long before that, and she was a massive bright light in my life. So bright that I moved halfway across the country to be with her after years of us being online-only friends. The move was the best thing I ever did in my life, it made my quality of life go up dramatically because I was able to be myself and be free in Portland, since I couldn't be that in Iowa. Having Lily there with me as well, super close friends the entire time whether we were dating or not, made it even better. She was unerringly, kind, compassionate, accepting, loving, intelligent, interesting, delightful, and her weird matched mine perfectly and balanced out many of my character flaws. (Such as my being a pessimist who is distrustful of strangers, and her being an optimist who trusted people easily.) Every discussion we had was fascinating and engaging, her laugh was like an antidepressant that worked instantly, we could spend hours entertaining each other with bad puns and worse jokes.

When she died, unexpectedly in her sleep from a seizure (she had epilepsy), an important part of my spirit died with her. Despite having not been much of a crier since before puberty, I couldn't go more than an hour without something reminding me of her and setting me off crying. I had to stop listening to my favorite musical artist because Lily had introduced me to them, and so music that used to comfort me when I was overstimulated would make me start crying uncontrollably even in public, and I hate crying in front of other people because I used to get bullied mercilessly for being a crybaby. I used to be a very spiritual person, not religious, but I would sing as a spiritual experience and even dance around for the same reason. I haven't done much of either since Lily died. Even writing this, now, I have to fight back tears. Without her brilliant positive nature, my negative nature just keeps pulling me in deeper, making me a more miserable person, and the rise of fascism in my country is just making it even worse. I feel like I could maybe be coping and more hopeful in these trying times if she had never died.

I still have dreams about her, where she has either come back from the dead or never died to begin with. I still fight tears when I wake up from these dreams, because it's almost like losing her all over again.

A few weeks ago, just when I thought it couldn't get worse, I found out the answer to a mystery that had plagued me ever since she died: how can a seizure kill someone? Well the answer is simple: flailing around in bed from the seizure, the victim can suffocate in their bedding. Given Lily was prone to sleeping on her stomach under a massive pile of blankets and comforters, I'd say it's 99% likely she suffocated in her sleep because of the seizure. And that just messed me up even more than before.

I've been coping a bit with my writing. I have a whole arc for this one character who, like me, loses her best friend ever very suddenly (her friend was murdered) and even almost a decade later, she's still a wreck about it in various ways. So I explore my grief through that character. But it's a bandage on a gaping wound. A wound that's scabbed over, but any picking at the scab makes it open up again. I do it sometimes anyway.

I've also named characters after her, and gave one new character epilepsy in her honor. One of the more prominent side characters in some of the books has a variant of her personality. Wait, correction: two of them do.

The worst part? I didn't even get to go to her funeral. Her mom didn't invite me or tell me where it was, and I still don't know why. I'm basically taking everyone who was there at their word that she died, which is probably why I keep having dreams that she's still alive... like my brain still can't quite believe it because seeing is believing. Though at the same time, I don't know if I would feel better or worse if I could have seen her body. Probably a lot worse, though.

I get through it by walking through the world with proverbial blinders on, dissociating when it's too much to bear. I do laugh, quite often; it's another coping mechanism, one I learned from years of depression. Laughter is a lit match against the darkness, bright but fading fast.

~ End quote ~

The character who's dealing with the grief of her best friend being murdered: One of Vedya's multiverse doubles, Sarah's double being the murder victim. This double first appears briefly in book 4, and becomes a major character in book 5. She goes by the nickname of Naga.

The two characters who have variants of Lily's personality: Acorn Bonewits (a wood nymph) and Caligo (a kind of faery in the story called an Aeventyrichor). I think it's fitting that they're both faeries. I guess there's also a bit of Lily in Cally (Calandra Metaxas, a human).

The character I gave epilepsy to: Mia "Lenore" Green, one of Ashkii's friends, also human. She also has some of Lily's personality in her. Ashkii's first encounter with her is her having a seizure in art class. I only just now realized that her preferred name, Lenore, is canonically named after a famous dead woman from Poe's writings. Like, even in-universe that's true, since she's a major Poe fan.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Otep - Confrontation

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Was I optimistic?

As yet unpublished, years ago I wrote a book ("Ressa Akamai and the Bridge Not Crossed," #4 in my Ravenstone Family series) taking place in an alternate universe where the date was 2029 AD. Donald Trump was President For Life Donald Trump, FEMA had been turned into work camps for the homeless and disabled, & ICE camps were full-fledged death camps for various other undesirables.

It's also a fantasy novel with magic and witches, so other things going on were that magic had been exposed, faeries were routinely attacking major cities and rendering them to ruins, Trump was having law enforcement arrest witches and trying to turn them into Janissaries for the US military, and the universe was ending.

Apart from that last part about the universe ending, which had nothing to do with Trump, I now fear I may have been optimistic.

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Trump isn't even trying to pretend not to be fascist now

Donald Trump is trying to use the National Guard to take over Washington DC, and now he intends to go after Democrat controlled cities and states. So he's full on Hitler at this point, he's not even trying to pretend otherwise now. Here is the link: https://shorturl.at/ssaPb (It goes to Yahoo News)

If you are in the National Guard and you follow this extremely illegal order from the fascist orangutan infesting the white house, you would be a traitor to your country, and the punishment for treason in the US is execution. Be a true patriot, refuse any and all illegal orders from Fuhrer Trump. Then please arrest Trump and arrest everyone in the Supreme Court and his cabinet and every other government facility who has been helping him, so that we can convict them all of treason.

Current Mood: angry

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YouTube wants your data to sell to other companies.

You should sign this petition to protest YouTube's new AI-powered age verification system. And here's why:

AI has proven again and again that it doesn't work right, and the ways it can mess up can be horrible. AI based age verification, which has no transparency at all, is going to hurt a lot of people. Customers and content creators alike are going to be kicked off for unknown reasons, reasons which may include "user is not white," "user looks younger than they actually are," "user has facial scars or burns," "user is disabled in a way that affects their face," "the AI just glitched," and many other reasons. We should boycott YouTube until they stop this nonsense.

Furthermore, companies are already finding that it's easier and cheaper to hire humans to do things rather than AIs, because AI keeps failing in weird and expensive ways. Recently, an AI being used as a programming tool deleted petabytes of the programmer's data for no apparent reason, data which was unrecoverable. What if YouTube's AI glitches and deletes entire channels for no reason?

Then there's the privacy issue. Companies like YouTube have far too much data about us as it is already, and now they want even more, including your face, credit card information, and maybe videos of you naked in your home. They aren't satisfied with the billions of dollars they're making in ad revenue, so they're trying to make you a product they can sell.

"But I have nothing to hide!" Of course you do. Data leaks are a weekly phenomenon nowadays. Do you really want to risk your nudes, your credit card information, your home address, or other important data being leaked online by giving that information to a service that is supposedly ad-supported and thus supposedly free to use? It's bad enough when that stuff happens to sites where you paid money for something; we can't let it happen for free sites like YouTube.

And lastly, YouTube already has a special version of their site aimed specifically at kids, where comments are disabled. They claim they're doing this data mining to protect the kids, but they're lying to you. This age verification won't work properly, it won't protect kids, it won't even keep kids out of places they shouldn't be. And why are we giving that job to corporations like Google anyway? That's meant to be the parents' job.

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Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn

Zoe Ardelay and her father have lived in exile in a small village since he, a former courtier, had an argument with the king. At the opening of the book, her father has just died of natural causes. Then Darien, the king's advisor, shows up and announces that Zoe has been chosen as the king's fifth wife. Zoe, immersed in the drifting, passive phase of grief, sets out with him for the capital city she hasn't seen since she was a child. The story does not go in any of the expected directions after that, starting with the conveyance they use to get there: a new invention, a gas-powered automobile.

This small-scale fantasy is the first of five "Elemental Blessings" books, but stands alone. It does end up involving the politics and rulership of a country, but it's mostly the story of one woman, how her life changes after her father dies, and the relationships she has with the people she meets. It's got great characters and relationships, focuses on small but meaningful moments in a very pleasing manner, and has outstandingly original worldbuilding. Most of it is not set in court, and involves ordinary poor and middle-class people and settings. The vibe is reminiscent of early Robin McKinley.

Welce, the country it's set in, has two aspects which are crucial to both plot and character, and are interestingly intertwined. They may seem complicated when I explain them, but they're extremely easy to follow and remember in the actual book.

The first aspect is a system of elemental beliefs and magic, similar to a zodiac. The elements are water, air, fire, earth, and wood. Every person in the country is associated with one of those elements, which is linked with personality characteristics, aptitudes, aspects of the human body, and, occasionally, magic. This is all very detailed and cool - for instance, water is associated with blood, wood with bone, and so forth. We've all seen elemental systems before, but Shinn's is exceptionally well-done. The way the elemental system is entwined with everyday life is outstanding.

How do people know which element is theirs? Here's where we get to the second system, which I have never come across before. Temples, which are not dedicated to Gods but to the five elements, have barrels of blessings - coins marked with symbols representing blessings like intelligence, change, courage, joy, and so forth. Each blessing is associated with an element. People randomly pull coins for both very important and small occasions, to get a hint of what way they should take or, upon the birth of a child, to get three blessings that the child will keep for life. The blessings a child gets may or may not show their element - if they don't, it becomes clear over time based on personality.

The blessings are clearly genuinely magical and real, but often in subtle ways. I loved the blessings and the way they work into the story is incredibly cool. Same with the elements. Zoe's element is water, and her entire plot has a meandering quality which actually does feel like a water-plot, based on the qualities ascribed to water in the book.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes small-scale, character-based fantasy AND to anyone who likes cool magic systems or worldbuilding. It's not quite a cozy fantasy but it has a lot of cozy aspects. I can see myself re-reading this often.

There are five books, one for each element. I've since read the second book, Royal Airs. It's charming and enjoyable (and involves primitive airplanes, always a bonus) but doesn't quite have the same lightning in a bottle quality of Troubled Waters.