Reading

Entry tags:

books

podcast friday

This week's episode is Wizards & Spaceships' latest, "Postcolonialism in SFFH ft. Suzan Palumbo." Suzan is a rising star in the Canadian speculative fiction scene and also just a very lovely, funny person. In the episode, she discusses the tropes and traditions that are baked into genre that reinforce colonialist mindsets, and the BIPOC authors pushing back against it. It's really good go listen.

(no subject)

My 60th year is drawing to a close. What do I want to do? Contrary to my usual “the exact number is not that important” outlook, I’ve found 60 is magical to me. So many things I’ve wanted to get rid of … well I’m 60 now why am I keeping that?
Last week I called the man who’s been the driving force behind creating a queer archive here in Vancouver. Off went a huge pile of written porn that I promised someone would end up in an archive. A bunch of magazines, porny and not. And the magnum mysterium (tis the season) a box full of slides from a porn site that lived and died in Vancouver ca 2000, chisel.com; pictures of people many of whom I’m sure are gone, plus the work of local photographers, but I lack the resources to flesh out (heh) those stories on my own. Perhaps some eager youngster will take to it!
We bought a persimmon tree, the non-astringent flat-fruited kind, in the spring and it’s been living in a gigantic pot since. We had about ten fruits from it, and I just ate the most perfect one. Truthfully, they are not much good until they’ve had a few frosts. It was not jelly-like and sweet, as I’ve come to expect from the ones in the store, but more peach like in consistency and almost like fresh dates in flavour, fresh and mildly sweet.

Current Mood: pensive

Entry tags:

Alas and alack

As much as I love writing my Ravenstone series and re-reading the books, I really think it would be much better as an animated TV series or a live-action TV series once completed. So much of how I write it and how I think about it when I write it is in terms of TV or movie cinematography. The way the narration works tends to follow the camera shots in my imagination, and cuts to scenes feel like the way they're done in TV and movies. And there are so many things I struggle to describe even though I can clearly see them in my mind's eye. A lot of Dalia's clothing is like that, for a good example. What got me thinking along these lines was imagining Dalia discovering "elegant gothic lolita" style fashion, and trying to describe how she would look in one of those dresses, especially the softer, pinker, more blatantly girly ones. Best I came up with so far is another character saying "You look like one of those old Victorian era dolls with the poofy, lacy dresses and the fancy, lacy bonnets, but lacier, poofier, and obviously you're black where all those dolls were white."

Like, it would be such a great look on a TV series, whether animated or live-action, but I think even with my best descriptions, the reader would really have to google "elegant gothic lolita" and switch to the images tab to really get a good idea of what I'm going for.

But yeah... Dalia already often dresses in 'Victorian goth' style, so EGL would just be a logical progression of her sense of style.

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TNG/DS9 crossover

I just had the most interesting idea: a Star Trek alternate timeline fanfic story where Lt. Cmdr. Data decides to join Worf on Deep Space 9, for the experience of it. Honestly, I would read or watch an entire series about that timeline, it would be fascinating.

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Goood morning witches!

"Good morning and welcome back to 103.3 MM 'The Wand', your number one magical radio station covering the Portland metro area. I'm your host, Joshua Alderman; and in case you missed it, our special guest today is Doctor Aldric Johannessen, world-renowned expert in faery sociology.

"Earlier in our broadcast, Dr. Johannessen was telling us all about the various faery species who have been gracing Fae Springs these last few years, with special attention on the Fir Baite and Fir Ghobhar, since two of the new kids this year are outcasts from Fomor. But if you missed that, I'm so sorry to inform you we're doing general faery questions now. If you want to hear what you missed, you'll have to download the podcast version from our website, which is available for free at GTN://www.1033MMTheWand.com/podcast.html

"And with that out of the way, we can get ready to take your calls. Are you ready, Dr. Johannessen?"

"Yes, that I am," said a man with a low and soothing voice.

"Excellent. So let's hear from our callers." (click) "Hello there, you're first. Name and question?"

"Hi Joshua, I'm Ethel. Long time listener, occasional caller.”

“Welcome back, Ethel. What’s your question for the good doctor?”

“Well, I'm calling because I was in the Goblin Market last Saturday, and there was an incident with a Gremlin chasing some Goblins around with an iron skillet nearly as big as she was. I'm still confused about that. I thought faeries are allergic to iron? But the security that handled the situation didn't seem surprised by any of this. Can you explain?"

( Answer under the cut, as it's rather lengthy. )

Entry tags:

Life lived in dot points

The damn things continue to overlap

surgeon appointment: nothing new, but the margins on what was removed aren't big enough, back in surgery - that's my Friday.
the next step in the candidacy paperwork was in fact not my responsibility, and I now have an email to say I've passed that hurdle (here it is called 'Milestone 1').
Last Monday rehearsal of the year was this week; I tried bowing for one line of very long/slow notes and ow, nope, not yet. Was, however, good support for the other viola player, including singing some of the bits where the viola has the melody. We had a new violin player! I hope they come back, they seemed to be having fun.
Today was my last day on campus for the year. I will be working some over the shutdown, because I'm supposed to have my ethics drafted by mid January, and I still don't know what I don't know. Treated myself to curry and a fizzy drink for lunch.
Finished Building a second brain (Tiago Forte), which I've gained some useful ideas from. Recommended if you are needing a way to organise the information that is coming in to your life; not elsewise.
Youngest went bouldering with co-workers on Monday, and is learning yet again about not relying on hyperextended elbows to do the work (their grip strength isn't, and their forearms hurt "weirdly")
have woken up twice this week having done Something Stupid in my sleep. Monday it was the right hip not quite in the right place (went back in during rehearsal, I staggered in looking awful, I gather) and today it is something with the muscles of the right shoulder and halfway down the back -- I could barely move the shoulder this morning, and it has settled down to 'about half the time one or more muscles are spasming'.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This was really good. Feels like even though it's pretty recent and deals mostly with history, it could use an update as the technology for censorship has advanced rapidly in the past few years, so I hope she/her students are still doing some work around it.

Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Usually in December, after I've hit my Goodreads goal, I read something that's gratuitously long and would otherwise fuck up my goal if it didn't spill over into January (yay for anything and everything in my life being quantified and gamified, love that for me). This year's winner is my high school English teacher's favourite book, which he recommended but said that we wouldn't get until we hit middle age. Well, now I am middle aged so I'm reading it.

It's a curious book. I always hit the literary classics and go like. Oh. Haha. This is stranger and funnier than I imagined.

Me: I guess I will finally read literary classic The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann: Allow me to introduce my himbo failson, Hans Castorp. He is pure of heart and dumb of ass.

Am I enjoying it? I dunno, as much as you can enjoy a 1000+ page book which goes into detail about the breakfast, second breakfast, rest period, lunch, dinner, second dinner, etc. of the character. Which is the point, really—the mountain in question is a liminal space where in theory, the tuberculous patients can leave, but don't. But it's a slog.

Current Location: Ташкент, Узбекистан

Entry tags:

Не останавливаться!

На разгребание фотографий из Александрии у меня ушёл аж целый месяц. Но мы тут подумали, что после Александрии должен быть обязательно Константинополь. Словом, билеты в Турцию уже закуплены, и в четверг мы отправляемся прямиком в Стамбул. А оттуда – ещё и в Чанаккале и в пару интересных мест вокруг него.

Вообще, в этом же списке после Александрии и Стамбула должны стоять ещё Рим и Афины, но после известных всем событий российские паспорта стали плохосовмещаемы с шенгенскими визами, так что всё это пока отложим на потом. Кстати, есть у меня некая тень подозрения, что турецкие пограничники, увидев нашу фамилию, подумают, что мы приехали мстить за предков. Наверное, будь у нас в руках билеты до мест вроде Карса, Эрзурума или Вана, они бы именно так и подумали, но мы едем в совсем другую часть Турции, так что – будем надеяться, что проблем с пересечением границы у нас не будет.

Кстати, кое-кто из моих прапрадедов по материнской линии украл себе невесту из Турции, так что эту страну можно считать одной из моих многочисленных исторических родин.

Entry tags:

typo du jour

Typo du jour

These are all from the same auto-transcription closed captioning.

rosary phone (rotary phone)
content scripture (content description)
gaming council (gaming console)

This was from a presentation by an Irish group who teach cyber safety in schools. I don't remember how pronounced the presenter's accent was, but ah, those sure are some interesting errors.

Entry tags:

Life lived in dot points

surgical recovery continues apace. The incision has mostly healed, although the knot of dissolving stitches at one end got caught when I was trying to clean it and pulled it slightly open, so I've now cut off the knot, put a fancy steri-strip over it to hold it together, and a little circular sticking plaster over that. Internals still noticeably sore, externals are itchy; have been putting 'scar therapy gel' on which seems to help (it was in the cupboard; I do not know what any of the ingredients are). I see the surgeon on Tuesday for follow up.
reviewers comments for my candidacy proposal are in (received late on Friday). I'm not actually sure what the next step is -- I'll work it out tomorrow. I think it said 'no edits' which is a surprise, given that I have been reading and annotating weekly since submitting, and there are a lot of 'this could be clearer' and 'what did you mean here?' notes. Also, I found another answer to one of the reviewers questions from the presentation about why books and not films/tv, which is that I'm hoping to get a wider range of cultural influences (and I have a paper from Italy in which almost all of the TV/movies that the kids reported was from the USA, which very much supports my 'this would be an issue' argument)
there was an HDR and supervisors lunch run by the school I'm in on Monday. This was very interesting and I met a lot of people. Including one who I was unsurprised to discover is an acquaintance of Youngest. Very queer (not very surprising) and neurodiverse (should not have been surprising) bunch that I met.
weather has been Warm. To the point that artisanat has been volunteering to put the air-con on.
There have been some changes to the mix of South Asian grocers on High Road. One of the two north of Bunnings has gone (and the one still there no longer stocks palak paneer in their shelf-stable preprepared meals; not the regular nor the tofu/vegan option. They do, however, still have some vegan options). There is a new one that is further south than the ones I was aware of -- nearly to where the petrol station is. To the point that it is still so new that not all the shelves are stocked; we couldn't find the box meals there at all, but we had to rush because we ran out of time. Thus there are still three that I'm aware of.
Monday's rehearsal I went with the intention to play pizzicato, which was mostly fine, but I got there to discover the C string broken (spare was at home) so had to transpose some of the work up an octave, which ah, that needs practice. As does one of the sections we hadn't got to that I'd failed to realise has a lot of fast notes.
craft has stalled
reading - one of these week's I'll get around to doing another reading post. Over on the Book Club of Habitica Discord I've joined the TBR Bingo challenge for Dec/Jan and set myself a bingo card of 16 books from my 'paused' list. So far, I've finished 1, which is progress but not as fast as I want.

Entry tags:

dreams

Whole new level of fucked

I just woke up from my upsetting dream in the real upsetting part was that it was a false awakening. First layer was an upsetting dream about Lily. I mean, it was pleasant until I started noticing weird stuff made me realize it was a dream and I tried waking up. I thought I did wake up because in the dream when I was waking up I became aware of the CPAP and I took it off and I got up and I don't remember what happened after that apart from there being more dreams but then I just woke up for real and realized that I had gone through a false awakening.

And don't you start,

kengr.

Except now I do actually remember more. Other things in the dream after the false awakening: couldn't find my phone, there was a guy who was made of wood, only he had one leg and the other leg was a prosthetic, except the guy who was made of wood started out as a guy played by Sylvester Stallone who needed a super macho song to fight to. Oh, and I sucked Will Smith's cock.

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The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

After a wet-bulb heat wave kills thousands in India, the UN forms an organization, the Ministry for the Future, intended to deal with climate change on behalf of future generations. They're not the only organization trying mitigate or fight or adapt to climate change; many other people and groups are working on the same thing, using everything from science to financial incentives to persuasion to terrorism.

We very loosely follow two very lightly sketched-in characters, an Irish woman who leads the Ministry for the Future and an American man whose life is derailed when he's a city's sole survivor of the Indian wet-bulb event, but the book has a very broad canvas and they're not protagonists in the usual sense of the word. The book isn't about individuals, it's about a pair of phenomena: climate change and what people do about it. The mission to save the future is the protagonist insofar as there is one.

This is the first KSR book I've actually managed to finish! (It's also the only one that I got farther in than about two chapters.) It's a very interesting, enlightening, educational book. I enjoyed reading it.

He's a very particular kind of writer, much more interested in ideas and a very broad scope than in characters or plot. That approach works very well for this book. The first chapter, which details the wet-bulb event, is a stunning, horrifying piece of writing. It's also the closest the book ever comes to feeling like a normal kind of novel. The rest of it is more like a work of popular nonfiction from an alternate timeline, full of science and economics and politics and projects.

I'm pretty sure Robinson researched the absolute cutting edge of every possible action that could possibly mitigate climate change, and wrote the book based on the idea of "What if we tried all of it?"

Very plausibly, not everything works. (In a bit of dark humor, an attempt to explain to billionaires why they should care about other people fails miserably.) Lots of people are either apathetic or actively fighting against the efforts, and there's a whole lot of death, disaster, and irreparable damage along the way. But the project as a whole succeeds, not because of any one action taken by any one group, but because of all of the actions taken by multiple groups. It's a blueprint for what we could be doing, if we were willing to do it.

The Ministry for the Future came out in 2020. Reading it now, its optimism about the idea that people would be willing to pull together for the sake of future generations makes it feel like a relic from an impossibly long time ago.

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

Here's a series from a week or two ago that you really should check out: It Could Happen Here's "Darién Gap: One Year Later." It's four parts and I recommend listening to the whole thing, as it's some truly brilliant reporting, but if you are like me, the one that will stand out the most is the second episode, "To Be Called By No Name." It begins with a song written in 1948, Woody Guthrie's "Deportees (Plane Crash At Los Gatos)" that has horrifying resonance now, nearly 80 years later. From that jumping off point, James discusses the media coverage of the manufactured migrant crisis.

The four part series focuses on two migrants in particular, Primrose and her daughter Kim, from Zimbabwe. Primrose's family opposed the regime there and her father was disappeared; she and her daughter fled a deadly situation to try to claim refugee status in the US. The plight of migrants from African countries is even less discussed than those from Latin America or the Middle East; in detailing Primrose's story, James makes her visible, a heroic protagonist facing impossible odds, someone who lodges in your heart and stays there. It's great storytelling as well as great journalism. He refuses the objectivity of the mainstream reporters, who just don't bother to talk to migrants, let alone give voice to their names and stories.

Even posting about this tears me up. I know a lot of you reading this are doing your best to fight ICE but I want to beat every one of those bastards to death with my bare hands and by the end of this series, you will too.

(no subject)

If you've been reading this for a while you will have seen blogging about gardening. This has been a year I let things get away from me, starting in early summer when we were putting together the David show. I have three gardens, more or less, all small, but quite different.

The largest is the back yard at the house. This is the least public, so I feel very little pressure to keep on top of it, but it's also the most heartfelt (if you garden, you know what I mean). The two main issues are goutweed and bindweed. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do about these two, but I've clearly reached an age where I can't keep up with them. This is both a matter of physical pain (I was diagnosed with rheumatism) and emotional incapacity (I think this is where I maybe experience some of the executive dysfunction people with real ADHD know). My gardening friend Mark suggested letting the goutweed do as it will and just grow things that can go right through it. Which is actually not a bad plan, the only things back in the affected zone are things like lilies and raspberries, which won't be bothered by it anyway. I'm about done collecting dozens of irises ... I love them but this climate is not that great for them, they universally develop a leaf rot late in the season and look like hell until the spring. On the other side of the yard is a bed that I planted to perennials. They cannot tolerate the goutweed - or the bindweed - that are now inextricably intertwined with everything. I'm inclined to dig it all up and cardboard + mulch it, just kill off everything that's in there and start from scratch.

The second is the little patch in the front of the house. It's actually the least trouble. The only issue there is that whoever initially painted our house purple decided to make a purple garden, and that included a purple-leaved cherry, which blocks most of whatever light that patch gets. But that's tolerable. Lots of ferns, Aquilegia, etc. make it fairly easy to look after.

The third garden is the island in the middle of the street down by the park. That one, despite it's troubles (horsetail throughout; there is no easy way to water it; and because it's public, people sometimes trample or drive over it) is the easiest to look after. Mainly, I find, because it's something I feel like I'm doing *with* the neighbours, who often stop to chat or comment. Even when I really really don't feel like working on it (the glaring light and heat of August is the worst) that gets me motivated. It's a bit patch and quirky but I don't think anyone would prefer beds of petunias. Or if they would they know better than to say so :)

The "more or less" is that we guerilla plant a bunch of spring blooming bulbs in the park. But that's just a matter of putting them in in the fall, and then weeding out the dandelions in the psring (if there are too many dandelion flowers, Karen will complain to the city, who will just mow it flat).

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Ka-Nams'ooms'tef

The most recent conlang I was working on that didn't have a name? I've decided it will be the language of one of the Gremlin cultures. It has that vibe to it, and I needed a Gremlin language anyway. I am naming it Ka-Nams'ooms'tef, which means "The people's words."

As a better reminder of it, here's some examples:

While English uses SVO word order (Subject Verb Object, like in "Sam ate apples.") this language, which has no name so far, uses OVS: Object Verb Subject. So "Sam ate apples" becomes "Apples ate Sam." I have done this before, too.

“I hurt them intentionally.”
(them, plural) (physically hurt intentionally) (I)
“ik ood'too ak.”

“I move forward.”
(move forward) (I)
“tee'at ak.”

“I move toward you.”
(you) (move intentionally toward) (I)
“ek tee'iz ak.”

“My name is Qipog. What is your name?”
(Qipog) (name) (me). What name you?”
“Qipog shastef ka'nak. ook shastef ek?”

“I hurt them intentionally, in the name of Sklarg-Mork.”
Sklarg-Mork (in/by/with), (them, plural) (physically hurt intentionally) (I).
“Sklarg-Mork faz, ik ood'too ak.”

"Die, foul monster! Cease to be! I harm you! You will threaten this family no more! By (the power of) Sklarg-Mork!"
(monster) (foul), (be destroyed)! (Exist no more!) (You) (I intentionally harm)! (This family) (no more) (threaten) (by you)! Sklarg-Mork (by the power of)!"
"Zoodraḥk mumbarag, zood'fed! Ñakteebad! Ek tee'took nak! Lum'numik hel zoodow ek! Sklarg-Mork fazak!"

Current Location: Эль-Кувейт, Кувейт
Current Music: Yasmine Hamdan - Al Jamilat

Entry tags:

Как мы побывали в Кувейте

Пересадка в Кувейте – тема вполне годная, если учесть один нюанс, о котором вряд ли сообщат те, кто продал вам билеты. В этом посте я попробую всё это описать более-менее подробно. Так что, если вы тоже захотите дать джазу (в смысле – слетать Джазирой через Кувейт), то эта информация вам очень пригодится.

Итак, согласно правилам аэропорта Эль-Кувейт, если продолжительность вашего транзита превышает восемь часов – то вы должны забронировать и оплатить гостиницу в аэропорту, и ждать свой рейс там. Если я сейчас скажу вам, сколько стоит номер в той гостинице – то вы наверняка тут же свалитесь со стула и отобьёте себе какое-нибудь место. Потому я лучше промолчу.

Пассажиры, как известно, в своей массе – народ хитрый, а потому быстро нашли способ, как отмазаться от этой гостиницы. Называется этот способ: «У меня нет денег». Вот, буквально, так: прилетаете в Кувейт и на все попытки впарить вам гостиницу отвечаете: «У меня нет денег». Что они смогут с вами сделать? Да, в общем-то, ничего. Выгнать из аэропорта? Не смогут – у вас нет визы. Депортировать? А какой в этом смысл, если у вас и так уже есть билет, и вы в любом случае скоро улетите. Поселить вас в гостиницу забесплатно? Ну, они не столь щедры. Потому всё, что им останется – это сказать вам: «Ну ладно – ждите в аэропорту». И какое-то время этот метод работал. Но кувейтцы тоже не вчера родились на свет, а потому быстро сообразили, как заставить вас всё-ж-таки заплатить за эту гостиницу. Теперь ещё в аэропорту вылета, когда вы будете регистрироваться на рейс до Кувейта, от вас потребуют прямо там оплатить эту гостиницу. А иначе вы попросту не попадёте в самолёт.

Ну что же, поторговавшись какое-то время с представителем авиакомпании, мы в итоге ту гостиницу оплатили. И уже через три часа оказались в Кувейте.

Аэропорт города Эль-Кувейт тесноват для такого количества транзитных пассажиров, но вполне функционален. Приятно удивило, что все надписи там продублированы на русском. По этим самым надписям, указателям и подсказкам многочисленных сотрудников аэропорта, расставленных на каждом повороте, мы без проблем добрались до нужного терминала. Там нас поприветствовал сотрудник, который, взглянув на наши билеты и гостиничную бронь, вызвал ради нас двоих аж целый автобус. С помощью этого автобуса нас и препроводили в гостиницу (она тоже находится на территории аэропорта, но с транзитной зоной никакими переходами не связана, так что процедуру попадания туда из терминала в сопровождении сотрудника аэропорта никаким другим словом, кроме «препровождение», не назовёшь).

Вот мы и в Кувейте. Как-то так эта маленькая арабская страна с большими запасами нефти выглядит из окна гостиницы. Даже не знаю, что вам в связи с этим сказать. Если бы лет двадцать назад кто-то сообщил мне, что однажды я окажусь в Кувейте – то я бы, наверное, рассмеялся. И в то же время – вот он, этот самый Кувейт, прямо за окном. Примерно тогда же, двадцать лет назад, название этой страны не вылезало из новостей в связи с операцией «Буря в пустыне» (если помните, вся заваруха тогда началась с того, что Саддам Хусейн решил по-быстрому завоевать Кувейт, но не тут-то было). Сейчас же Кувейт упоминается, пожалуй, только в связи с колебаниями цен на нефть.

( Смотреть ещё )

А потом, за два часа до вылета, за нами снова приехал автобус для обратного препровождения нас в терминал (а та самая тёплая куртка Маши оказалась забыта в гостинице – ну, вы помните всю эту историю). Далее: три с половиной часа лёта – и мы в Ташкенте.

P.S. На всякий случай предупрежу, что в Кувейте всё очень строго с провозом алкоголя – даже когда вы летите транзитом. Если хотите получить бесплатную экскурсию по кувейтской тюрьме – можете попробовать провезти с собой бутылочку, в остальных случаях – настоятельно не советую.

Техническая информация:

Наименование объекта: Эль-Кувейт
Статья на Википедии: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Эль-Кувейт

Географические координаты: 29.375, 47.98
Высота над уровнем моря: 16 m

На Google-карте: 29.375,47.98
На Яндекс-карте: 29.375,47.98

Почтовый адрес: Кувейт, г. Эль-Кувейт

Содержание

(no subject)

I made tourtière for the first time ever. I have a troubled history with pastry so I have avoided making pies, but I also love meat pie especially and the ones in the stores lately are not cutting it. This recipe is adapted from Madame Jehane Benoit, so I feel the saintly presence of Herself helped me succeed. Parking the recipe here so I don't lose it.

Filling
0.5 kg ground pork
0.5 kg ground beef
1 tbsp oil or fat
1 large onion, diced
1 large potato, shredded
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp salt

Heat oil in pan, fry onion until transparent. Add meat and potato and fry until it carmelises. If there's excess fat, drain it. Then add the spices and heat to bloom them. Take it off the heat and let it cool fully.

Crust
1.25 c all-purpose flour
0.5 tsp salt
0.25 lb butter cut into pieces and frozen
3-4 tbsp ice water

Refrigerate everything for an hour or more.

Put dry ingredients into food processor and pulse a few times. Add butter and process until crumbly but not melting. Drizzle in water until it combines into a dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and form into a disk (two for double recipe). Refrigerate for more than an hour in a sealed container.

Preheat oven to 400F, put a jellyroll pan on the bottom rack to preheat.

Roll out the dough and line the springform with it, bottom and sides. Add filling. Add top crust, cut vents. Turn down sides to make a "rustic" top crust. Put the whole deal on the jellyroll pan. Bake at for about an hour until the pastry browns. I didn't wash with egg but that's trad and would have made a browner top crust.

- the 10" springform needed a double batch of the pastry and it was just barely enough with nothing over
- could have used more spices, surprisingly even what I did use wasn't overpowering
- lard can be used instead of butter

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The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

An Icelandic horror novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal! I had no idea she's fluent in Icelandic.

Iðunn experiences unexplained fatigue and injuries when she wakes up, but is gaslit by doctors and offered idiotic remedies by co-workers. (Very relatable!) Meanwhile, she's being semi-stalked by her ex-boyfriend/co-worker, her parents refuse to accept that she's a vegetarian and keep serving her chicken, and the only living beings she actually likes are the neighborhood cats that she's allergic to.

After what feels like an extremely long time, it finally occurs to her that she might be sleepwalking, and some time after that, it finally occurs to her to video herself as she sleeps. At that point some genuinely scary/creepy/unsettling things happen, and I was very gripped by the story and its central mystery.

Is Iðunn going out at night and committing all the acts she's normally too beaten down or scared to do while sleepwalking or dissociating? Is she having a psychotic break? Is she a vampire? Is she possessed? Does it have something to do with a traumatic past event that's revealed about a third of the way in?

Other than the last question, I have no idea! The ending was so confusing that I have no idea what it was meant to convey, and it did not provide any answers to basically anything. I'm also not sure what all the thematic/political elements about the oppression of women had to do with anything, because they didn't clearly relate to anything that actually happened.

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

This was a miss for me. But I was impressed by the very fluent and natural-sounding translation.

Content note: A very large number of cats are murdered. Can horror writers please knock it off with the dead cats? At this point it would count as a shocking twist if the cat doesn't die.

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.

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Life lived in dot points

Well into 'it's not one thing after another, the damn things overlap' territory here

nominal deadline for my confirmation of candidature to have been submitted has passed without anything from my reviewers (one of three from our school has theirs)
Eldest's quilt has been somewhat abandoned, which is annoying me but I haven't had the cope
Instead I've been working on logistics of Youngest's quilt, which is very heavy in the planning stages (picture quilt, converting it from a photo)
Took a week at home on light duties last week, this week I'm back in the office. Did surprisingly well yesterday. Surgery site looks to have healed on the surface but the internals are still quite sore, so I'm still sleeping with the post-surgery bra.
Middlest and their partners have bought a house. They move in January. There was a messy blow up with the fourth housemate, who has since moved out, so they are learning how they fit together as a trio, and it sounds like things are going well. R's parents are providing lots of important support for the process.
Saw the nurse for follow up on Monday. They didn't like the wound support stuff I'd found in the pharmacy (because it is plasticky) and replaced it with a stiff fabric 'can be washed but blow dry it after' dressing that was so annoying/itchy I took it off last night (and it took off lots of ick; that area has an unsurprising build up of Stuff) and put the second piece of the wound support stuff on. That is so much better -- it is a clear plastic lattice that actually moves with the area, rather than digging in. Also, I'm not reacting to the glue.
My middle sibling and their partner are moving to Perth for two years. D has a job at UWA, K's job will allow 'remote' work from the Perth office. Amusingly, D described UWA as 'not restructuring' and Youngest laughed when reading that out. My comment was that from my perspective it has never not been restructuring, it is just the level that is changing. Plus, there was a leaked minutes from some meeting that suggested they were going to try and get a merger with Curtin, which I learned about when the Curtin Guild sent a 'not if we can help it' email out to all students. Pointed out to sibling that as they and I share a family name there is a non-zero chance they are going to get spotted as related.