Reading Wednesday 7/12

[liv]

I said I'd try to post more here, especially links and just general keeping in touch posts. I'm not very good at sticking to that sort of resolution, but anyway.

Right now I've had a potential Covid exposure, I'm testing negative so far but feeling pessimistic. It's my "fault" in that I took a trip and did some higher risk activities than I normally would, particularly eating indoors when it was around freezing outside and dark and foggy. The person I travelled with is unpleasantly ill, so I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I still don't understand how anyone thinks living like this is preferable to the alternative of actually having public health measures.

Anyway, recently read (locally):

Elon and the virgin by siderea. It's a very cool mashup between Elon Musk snark and Mediaeval religious folklore as expressed through early music.

lannamichaels has no cultural context for a situation where dating gives you social cachet and benefits and has written some lovely meta about the fake dating trope.

rushthatspeaks is always brilliant, and has written on porn as a genre.

Also sorcyress and silveradept, among the most engaging and interesting writers in my circle, are doing some cool December Days series, on dice and adjectives respectively. Worth a look.

Currently reading: Theoretically Netwon's cannon by Greg Keyes, in reality I may DNF. It's a very cool alt-history setting where the world actually works according to Newton's esoteric theories about things like alchemy and magical sympathy, not just his mechanics. And the characters are fun, but the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level is a bit subpar and I find it difficult to get past that to enjoy what is an original and exciting story. Or possibly I'm just not in a reading place at the moment, that seems to happen more and more these days.

Comments

[ambyr]

I did find the Keyes series had satisfying payoff for all its concepts, but I can’t say the writing style changed much from beginning to end.

[rysmiel]

I found Newton's Cannon and sequels worth finishing, though a bit clunky at the prose level, and also prone to weird lurches in plot direction that feel like the author either was not sure what he wanted to make central to his story or changed his mind about it as things progressed. Some of the ideas in it are very cool indeed, though.

[sorcyress]

Aw, thank you for the shoutout! I have been pleasantly surprised by how many other people have been enjoying the project --I think I worry that because my dice collection is a little bit of a special interest, then it will be boring for others if I talk about it too much, but I'm finding that at least in this format (presenting it in my own space for others to consume or not as they want) it's been working really well!

~Sor

[(Anonymous)]

I still don't understand how anyone thinks living like this is preferable to the alternative of actually having public health measures.

Living like what? Almost everyone has just gone back to living exactly as they were in 2019.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree.

I am a little worried, Liv, that the pandemic has triggered some health anxiety/paranoia that you should find a way to resolve, perhaps with help from a therapist or other professional. In all honesty, I have immunocompromised friends who are living with less fear and that can't be right

[(Anonymous)]

If people want to make their own lives miserable then fair dos that’s entirely up to them but fact is nobody else is living like that.

[silveradept]

Thank you for the mention. I'm definitely going to go and look at all of the shiny math rocks as well as the other article pieces.

I hope you managed to evade catching the virus (and, if not, that it was a quick course easily walloped by treatments.) I would prefer real health measures as well, but all we seem to be getting is more and more aggressive pretending that there's no problem instead of trying to make it so there isn't one.