liv | Reading

Most recent entry in "back on my Seeming bullshit" is A Failure of Imagination, because dang, I really like "And this is a love song / Even if it doesn’t sound like one / ‘Cause there’s a lot of strange love / That doesn’t fit into the way love’s done".

I've spent the last two days at work slowly working through all their albums I've bought from Bandcamp, which is most of them at this point. This is partly because I was showing Clayton Workbestie my 2013 ipod that I've found and started carrying around, and he responded with something like "I bet it has happier music". I demurred, but added that I wasn't on my Seeming bullshit then, which got a positive "oh hey dope, you listen to Seeming too?" and then I had to pretend I listen to it a normal amount and not approximately 50% of my music by time this calendar year.

I have not been posting well, because I've been Fuckin' Busy and also because I've been carefully falling apart with the end of the year. There's a lot of "not now" tasks that are about to come absolutely slamming into "now" and I'm kinda struggling to keep track of all of them. I like dreaming of the world where I can actually track things like todo lists.

Yesterday was a really good day though, up until the part where I fell extremely asleep in a weird curled up heap on my bed with the laptop open:

*I restarted a knitting project that hadn't gone immediately perfect (I am genuinely pleased with myself for a: noticing that it wasn't going satisfyingly and taking steps immediately, so I only frogged a couple days worth of work and not longer, and b: making the project Much Harder for myself in a way that felt extremely satisfyingly stupid¹.)

*We're in MCAS hell, which is awful as always, but at least it's the last of the year, and it is giving me lots of bonus prep time to fuck around in my classroom and do nebulously useful things, like work on my knitting but also *some* grading.

*Also it means I can fuck off to the pharmacy before school today, which was good and necessary.

*Yesterday's DnD went SO GOOD! I both _very badly whiffed_ a roll, and then got to do some fun acting/social stuff and then _very much succeeded_ in the killing blow on the big bad we've been chasing after for quite a while. I have forgotten how much I miss having tanky characters and being able to actually like. Do damage to enemies! Anyways, it was real good, and also it was very funny to casually be like "and of course when Josh and Eve visit Boston in a couple weeks we'll all play in person together" and have both of them *and* Scoop be like "wait, that's an amazing idea". Like, y'all!

*Also watching Taskmaster with Tailsteak was Real Good! It always is, but we've missed a couple weeks in a row for various bullshit, so it was really nice to get closer to caught up. We're really enjoying this season! Which I feel like I say every season, but "do something brave" was _fantastic_. I really appreciate that we're having a season where it seems like everyone actually does want to win!

***

Anyways, I probably have other things I ought to be writing about, but I don't remember them because I am perpetually short-changed on sleep. I hope you're doing well!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Part of me feels I should elaborate, but much more of me feels like, you either get it or you don't.

I decided I wanted to use only half of each colour skein at a time so I unwound every single one of them, carefully so I could find an approximate halfway point, and then cut them there and rewound them. There are definitely both easier and better ways to do this (certainly the best would involve weight rather than length, especially because yarn is kinda stretchy) but it was very satisfying to set up a couple yardsticks taped to my work desk to unwind onto.

sonia

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. by Minas Karamanis.

Alice can now do things. She can open a paper she's never seen before and, with effort, follow the argument. She can write a likelihood function from scratch. She can stare at a plot and know, before checking, that something is wrong with the normalization. She spent a year building a structure inside her own head, and that structure is hers now, permanently, portable, independent of any tool or subscription. Bob has none of this. Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him. He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade.

Appearing Productive in The Workplace from No One's Happy.

The reckoning will not be subtle. The firms still doing the work properly will be in a position to charge for it. The firms that have hollowed themselves out will discover that what they hollowed out was the thing the client was paying for.

The AI Bubble from No One's Happy.

The reason none of them can stop is that the investment, the revenue, and the justification for the next investment are the same transaction. If Microsoft reduces its OpenAI commitment, it loses one of Azure’s largest customers, the AI revenue line that justifies $192 billion in capex, and the earnings growth that holds its stock price — all at once. The same logic binds Alphabet and Amazon to Anthropic: the equity position and the cloud contract are the same bet, and unwinding one unwinds both.

Funny but serious, Chieng issues an AI warning to grads by Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer.

He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. … It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.”

Quality in the Age of Slop by Sinclair Target.

This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also about AI—there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear—but those familiar with ZAMM should consider themselves warned. [...]

Quality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested, you have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality judgments (e.g. "Is this good code?") are based in part on the romantic mode of understanding and so within the classical mode alone aren't defensible. But they are necessary, because in the moment-to-moment work on the machine, there are thousands of facts you could consider, thousands of alternative threads you could follow, all equally valid in the classical mode, and the only way to make any sense of it all is to apply a Quality-focused version of Occam's Razor.

kaberett

I am going to lead, moderately emphatically, with: this is not a recommendation for this book (which in any case I haven't finished). The strapline is "how successful couples turn conflict into connection"; it was published in 2024. As recessional has pointed out to me, some of what's going on is that their target audience is specifically people who are treating each other shittily but don't want to break up/divorce/etc, and do want to learn to do better, but don't have the tools for how.

I, however, am very much coming from a perspective of being much more inclined to push for, if not breakups, the idea that there exists unacceptable behaviour one gets to just nope out over, and also of the tradition of DBT workbooks where there is a heavy emphasis on explicitly acknowledging, out loud, with your words, that the shit you just did is not okay.

All of this having been said, there are two things about this book (so far) that I Must Share.

The first is about a tool the (Schwarz) Gottmans' research group uses. Their research group, for context, is called the Love Lab.

Much of the data and observations about couples in conflict in this book comes from our decades of work in the Love Lab and from other important and groundbreaking observational studies by ourselves and other researchers. But now we are getting even more sophisticated and granular information from the AI we trained with John's emotional coding system, called SPAFF, short for Specific Affect Coding System.

... the second, I say, moving swiftly on, is that a little further on in the book I have encountered a genuinely new-to-me evopsych argument: that because of evolutionary pressures it is men who get Extremely Emotional very quickly, and take a long time to calm back down and reach a point where they can engage rationally again!

... At this point: He's flooded. She's flooded. Both hearts are hammering hard; adrenaline is zinging through their veins. Stan's physiological response has ratcheted up and overwhelmed him even faster than Susan's, and he'll take a lot longer to come down from it.

Here's why: For evolutionary reasons having to do with protecting the tribe and hunting dangerous animals for food, our prehistoric male ancestors gained a survival advantage by being able to quickly mount and sustain an adrenaline-packed response to danger. Those with this rapid response were better able to fight off enemies and hunt for food, and because they were better survivors, their genes were more likely to get passed down and eventually inherited by our men today. That kind of enduring fight-or-flight response might have helped Stan's distant ancestors survive, but it isn't doing him any favors now.

tl;dr for all that I regularly kind of want to throw it across the room there are some amazing moments in this thing. I'm only about halfway through! WHO KNOWS what wonders await me!!!

rachelmanija

In a country with Wild West vibes, young girls are often sold to brothels, to become sex slaves when they come of age. They are given magical tattoos of buds when they're bought. These tattoos slowly grow and blossom into flowers that the girls are nicknamed for. They cause excruciating pain when they're covered up, preventing the girls from fleeing and blending into the populace. But this isn't the only barrier to escape. The entire wilderness area is haunted by angry ghosts that can take physical form and rip you to shreds.

On Clementine's inaugural rape night, her would-be rapist nearly suffocates her, and she brains him with a lamp. As she would be executed for that, she, her older sister Aster who's been a sex slave for years already, and three other girls manage to escape the brothel and flee in search of a rumored woman who can remove the magic tattoos.

By far the most interesting character in the book is Violet, the brothel bully, spoiled brat, and magical opium addict who is the only one who knows where to find the woman who will be their salvation, if she actually exists. As they flee across the haunted wilderness, they're pursued by magical slavecatchers, are joined by a boy, and meet some rebels. Clementine has a romance with the boy, two of the girls have a romance together, and Violet and Aster have intense feelings which hopefully go somewhere in the sequel.

This novel has an extremely cool setting and unusual worldbuilding. I love ensemble casts and wilderness traveling. I expected to adore this, but while I did enjoy reading it, I didn't love it. I had been under the impression that the girls all had different magical powers, which is my own fault for misreading the blurb, but I was disappointed that they don't have any, except that Clementine can talk to ghosts a bit. More importantly, only Aster and Violet, plus Clementine to some degree, get any real characterization. I was interested in them enough that I'll read the sequel, but the book overall felt like it should have been fantastic but ended up merely good.

Content notes: There is a very violent, graphic rape attempt in chapter one. That's it for that but the repercussions of years of sexual abuse are felt throughout the novel.

forestofglory

I've been nearly constantly sick and/or overwhelemed for the last two weeks, but I did read some things!

The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier, Scott McCloud, et al.— A story about a group of kids forming a cartoonists club and making comics that’s also an intro to basic comics making and concepts. I’ve been wanting to read a bit more comics theory. (I’ve read Understanding Comics, but that was a while ago) Anyways this was cute and fun, but didn’t really scratch my comics theory itch. Would probably be good to give to a kid who is interested in comics though.

Supergirl's Family Vacation written by Brandon T. Snider, art by Sarah Leuver— This is so charming! It’s one of those graphic novels that’s its own little continuity – Supergirl is 13 and lives with her cousin Superman and his family and feels overlooked as a superhero. Anyway she convinces them all to go on vacation and then adventure happens! They go on a space road trip! Natasha Irons is there (she’s Supergirl’s best friend) Lois gets to be awesome but doesn’t steal the scene. There's a short scene of Batman and Wonder Woman getting instructions to take care of the stuff while they are away!

The whole thing is just very warm. I love the manga influenced art, the expressions are great, the colors are great! At one point there are magical girl-esqe transformation scenes. It’s very cute and sweet!

Batman & Robin Eternal by James Tynion IV et al— This did a much better job than Batman Eternal at being a story about legacy, and was just more cohesive in general. Only being half as long probably helped some. I read this when I was sick and bit out of it so I feel like some bits of it went over my head.

Laid-Back Camp Vol. 15-17 by Afro— While I’m on my slice-of-life manga kick I thought it would be nice to get caught up with this series.. It’s still one of my favorites of the genre, it's got food, female friendship, and great landscapes. It does make me sad that I am too disabled to go camping though.

Lightfall books 2-4 by Tim Probert— I was going to read these a bit slower, but they were due at the library so I had to hurry up a bit. This series is really good! I love the art, it's evocative, plus there are great landscapes! Also I didn’t say last time but there is a very good cat! The story went in some unexpected directions and I want to know what happens next! Too bad it's going to be a while before the next book is out.

A new season of my beloved wacky Chinese reality show The Truth has started airing and I'm excited for it! It's been a while since I watched anything.

maju

I always have a cup of tea with breakfast and with lunch, and I have to finish the food before the tea gets too cold. I'm usually successful, but today I obviously served myself too much lunch, because I was only about ⅔ of the way through the food (leftover chilli and rice from last night's dinner) when the tea ran out. Therefore I had to make myself a second cup of tea as well as reheat the rest of the food. I still haven't really learnt how much to serve myself in the bowls my daughter uses instead of flat plates, but I guess it should be less than I think. I.e. don't fill the bowl right to the top.

My legs seem to be taking longer than I expected to recover from all those kilometers I covered on the weekend. On Monday and yesterday I walked about 8 km/5 miles fairly briskly and my legs were ok, just a bit tired by the end, but this morning I ran about 6 km/4 miles and my legs weren't happy; they felt heavy after about 3 or 4 km, so I walked the final km of my planned 7 km route.

The weather is warming up so I'll be going for early morning walks instead of later in the day walks for a while. I should probably also dig out my summer pjs.

wychwood

What I don't understand is why I booked off a million days of annual leave and yet I have to work every day for months somehow. So unfair!!!

Last week was a full-on disaster, just could not do anything at all ever, brain in absolute non-cooperation mode. This week hasn't been so bad, but I'm very tired - yesterday I was tearing up at every vaguely moving scene in the radio drama I was listening to, which is always a Sign - despite doing my best to go to bed at reasonable hours, and I'm out tonight with choir and the rest of the week with church, including the whole of Saturday. Not feeling excited about it, tbh.

However, the heatwave is over; the rain has been occasionally exciting, but so far only when I'm indoors and when I've had to go out it's been relatively light; and the days are so long now. It might still be light when we come out of rehearsal tonight! I don't mind long nights in the winter, generally, but I do love the long summer days.

(Might not be next rehearsal, though, because they've unilaterally declared that they're going to keep us half-an-hour longer for each rehearsal for the rest of the other project. I was absolutely blazingly furious when I read the email; have now calmed down but I'm still 100% not into it, and I'm very tempted just to arrive and leave at the usual times instead... but I think that just ends up looking like petulance, and if I have a lift I'd have to wait around for that anyway...)

But I'm not going to worry about that now, because I like my blood pressure in the normal range, so I shall try and enjoy the blue sky and sunlight outside instead.

oursin

What I read

Finished Persuasion - but felt a bit out of sync with the online reading.

Then I went on to something Entirely Different: my interest was aroused by rydra_wong posting about Rachel Rosen's Cascade (2022) and Blight (2025) (The Sleep of Reason, #1 and #2), so I went and discovered that the ebooks could be obtained directly from the small Canadian press in question. Got stuck into Cascade and while I would not have thought I was up for grim eco/magical dystopia with festering political intrigue before everything goes to hell, I was absolutely gripped.

Pretty much the only reason I then read LM Chilton, I Think We Should Kill Other People (2026) was I had finished that and had not yet downloaded Blight. This was a not entirely happy mashup of rom-com (this part I thought worked least well), serial killer, and version of 'cut-off country-house' mystery (small airport shut down in middle of snowstorm trapping relevant characters), with added 'reality tv show that includes AI setting' and 'comic intentions'.

On the go

Have now gone on to Blight and may be some time (these are not your slender novellas).

Up next

Alexis Hall, Father Material arrived this week; also KJ Charles, How To Fake It In Society is currently a Kobo deal so have also got that on the ereader.

Still have not yet got to Slightly Foxed, and the latest Literary Review recently arrived.

oursin

Happy birthday,

pennski and

threeringedmoon!

sonia

"Introducing Myself", 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin, reprinted from The Wave in the Mind, 2004.

I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a , and I own three bras, and I’ve been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details. But details don’t matter. If we have anything to learn from politicians it’s that details don’t matter. I am a man, and I want you to believe and accept this as a fact, just as I did for many years.

Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin by Theo Downes-Le Guin. "I would never have proposed this exhibition in her lifetime. This is, after all, a writer who said in an interview, “Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.”"

Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating strange new worlds by Eoin Glackin. "Diane Duane’s early days writing fan fiction have led to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer."

lannamichaels

The dilemma: the Postal Service's song Such Great Heights. Is the line "they will see us waving" or "they won't see us waving". On listening to the official release, it's pretty swallowed and I go either way although I think "they will" makes more sense in context.

Lyrics videos differ.

Live version, 2013 sounds a lot like "won't". Okay but that has instruments, let's pull up an unplugged... okay that's "will". But that's 2023 and also it is common for bands in general to sing lyrics differently live.

There's also a known issue with several artists, of which I will not name names (Bob Dylan), where the official lyrics are clearly different from what is sung in the officially recorded version, so I'm hesitant in this case to trust any lyrics websites without knowing where they're scraping it from.

I assume at some point, this was officially clarified?

I can't even list this under my misheard lyrics nonsense, this one is not my fault and it has been not my fault for 23 years. I really think it's "will" but "won't" is a very cromulent hearing of their pronunciation.

redbird

I went to REI this afternoon to buy sandals, and I found a pair that suits me. They're Tevas, and if I'm satisfied after wearing them a few times, I'm going to order another pair in a different color (these are basic black).

I tried on several other shoes, which ranged from not quite right to just weird (a pair of Birkenstocks that had their arch supports in a really weird place relative to my feet).

Having found a pair that I thought fit, I walked down and then up a flight of stairs, as a test, and they were fine. I try not to climb a lot of stairs, but some are unavoidable, and it seemed like a useful test.

I'd been a little worried that there wouldn't be anything left in my size, since we're well into the time of year when a lot of people are wearing sandals, but REI clearly thinks it's still sandal season, along with hiking and running shoe season.

maju

Aria and Eden appear to have recovered from their nasty experience with the dog on Sunday evening. Aria is right here next to me and because she has removed the bandaid from her leg I can see that the skin was barely broken (but it *was* broken), and there is bruising around the area. The bite is on the fleshy part of the back of her calf so I guess the dog isn't very big.

After my weekend of covering lots of kms both running and walking I was intending to have an easy day or two, but it hasn't really worked out that way. Once I got outside and started walking (or running) I started thinking about ways to extend the distance because it was such beautiful weather (mild and sunny), and have therefore ended up walking about 8 km/5 miles both yesterday and today rather than the 5 or 6 km I was planning. Then I added another 3 km/2 miles this afternoon because I unexpectedly needed to go to the post office to mail off a couple of letters relating to the site work for my apartment. I do feel that I have to take advantage of the good weather we're having right now by getting in lots of walking and running, because soon it will be too hot and humid for exercise to be enjoyable. (And then before you know it, winter will be upon us again.)

oursin

And surely that would include realising that things were not always the exact same way they are today?

For decades, publishers have swapped out cultural references in new editions of books to appeal to younger readers. Fans aren’t always thrilled.

This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.

And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.

Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?

Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.

I was a bit beswozzled by this chap, too, though perhaps from a rather different direction. I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them?.

Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.

And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.

rmc28

(aha, this post-by-email has finally appeared!)

Books on pre-order:

Call Me Traitor by Everina Maxwell (1 Dec)
Unrivaled (Game Changers 7) by Rachel Reid (1 Jun 2027)

Books acquired in May:

and read:
1. Darksight Dare (Penric & Desdemona) by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Grumpy Fake Boyfriend by Jackie Lau
3. Four Weddings to Fall in Love by Jackie Lau
4. Radiant Star (Imperial Radch) by Ann Leckie [1]
5. Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre 1) by Rick Riordan
6. Platform Decay (Murderbot 8) by Martha Wells [1]

[1] Pre-order

Go me, I read everything I acquired this month. I did not read a single borrowed or previously acquired book but I have two library books awaiting my attention now I'm past the month boundary.

I bought Big Red Tequila on the first day of the month but got distracted and didn't pick it up again until the last few days. Rick Riordan's adult detective Jackson "Tres" Navarre has a lot of the sass and stubbornness of his teenage demigod Percy Jackson, the book is a lot longer but the pages turn just as quickly. There are six more books in the series ...

oursin

Happy birthday,

bearshorty,

sylvaine and

trinker!

china_shop

Poll #34680 Legacy media

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53

View Respondents

I have

View Answers

a pile/jumble or one or more boxes of audio cassettes
15 (28.3%)

a carefully curated selection of audio cassettes I don't want to part with yet (even if some of them have stretched)
13 (24.5%)

access to a tape deck
19 (35.8%)

a pile/jumble or one or more boxes of VHS tapes
9 (17.0%)

a carefully curated selection of VHS tapes I don't want to part with yet
19 (35.8%)

access to a VCR
20 (37.7%)

a lot of DVDs
43 (81.1%)

access to a DVD or Blu-ray player
43 (81.1%)

Super8, MiniDV, etc. tapes
2 (3.8%)

access to a camera or other way of playing them
0 (0.0%)

vinyl
17 (32.1%)

access to a record player
12 (22.6%)

a ridiculous number of CD-ROMs
28 (52.8%)

other
5 (9.4%)

a storage system I'm satisfied with
9 (17.0%)

at this point, it's just a lot of old stuff, help!
17 (32.1%)

ticky-box
28 (52.8%)

silveradept

Let us begin with a pair of bad decisions. The first is that someone enterprising stored a case of cans' worth of beer in one of the microfilm storage areas in an archives. The second bad decision is that they chose Natural Light as the beer to store. Natty Light and PBR are the things that someone drinks at university because they're cheap and terrible, and if you're at Duke, presumably, you have both the means and the willingness to drink better beer than that. I still wouldn't store beer in the microfilm area, because, well, warm beer is nobody's friend, either.

Snaaaaake, snaaaaake, ooooooh, it's a snaaaaake! (has been inducted into the British Film Institue's Archives.)

Pictures from a Black Fae Fest in Georgia, which I love primarily because of all the fae there having a good time. (Admittedly, the idea of Black fae was not much of an issue for me - a collegiate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Queen of the fairies (Drag Queen of the Fairies, at the bare minimum) and the King of the Fairies throwing up the hood of his hoodie to turn invisible.)

An accurate obituary for Ted Turner, who, as billionaires went, was eccentric, but also had some good ideas, and certainly turned aside from the path of being a completely evil man. Even though he cursed us with CNN.

( The grift, the corruption, the iocaine dilemma pushed on trans people, and, of course, the techbros )

Last out, someone has compiled together operating systems across the decades and tweaked them so they run properly in emulation, as a museum and a way of allowing people to access older OSes and play in them. The full edition is about 174 GB uncompressed, the lite one a mere 21 GB uncompressed and will need to download anything not initially included. This is a good reason to fire up your BitTorrent client for both downloading and seeding, because holy shorts, that's a lot of OSes to look through.

A plea not to remove the thing that makes science work by trying to produce automation and non-human scientific pipelines to get faster results. Just so - new knowledge does not always come from rearranging old knowledge, but from the breakthroughs and evolutionary paths and inefficiencies that come from exploration.

Server Charms, a self-contained small network with a few HTML pages that runs on an ESP32 powered by recycled vape batteries. Which is about small and local networks, and hiding a server in plain sight, or in an art project. Reminds me of PirateBox and its insistence on creating a local network for file-sharing and chatting and other such things, albeit on slightly more power-hungry hardware for slightly more power-hungry applications. The idea of small things, very local, very low-powered, and not connected to the greater Internet, still appeals, although there's always the difficulty that connecting to unknown WiFi networks is not encouraged. If there were some way to help satiate the curiosity, and also potentially be a viable local network, that would be something interesting. I feel like this is the sort of thing that a student might use to generate a network away from prying eyes. Or anyone else who would like a small and local enclave they can use away from surveillance and with community at its heart. (Which would work very well with things like PirateBox.)

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Moooooood tired
Tuuuuuune gorillaz - Clint Eastwood

mrissa

Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. This book is thinking quite intensely about the points of commonality among kinds of coerced work in the US, particularly imprisoned labor, "workfare" programs, and the graduate student and student athlete labor associated with the American university. Hatton is being very careful about the ways in which these types of labor are dissimilar as well as similar, and there are lots of interesting thoughts on how this impacts the labor, the laborers, and the larger labor pool in which we exist.

Andrew Hiller, Hornytown Chutzpah. Discussed elsewhere.

Mark Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph that, among other things, goes into some detail about considering what meaning the "Bronze Age" has beyond the geographic region where it originated. Revising thoughts about trade and tool use based on new information about this era is pretty cool, the idea that the future is not arriving linearly anywhere is usefully exemplified here.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. Kindle. Rereads. The latter is an ongoing favorite I've read many times and find delightful; the former is my least favorite Moomin book, and there's a reason I haven't reread it since I was about 8. Basically it's Moominpappa Explores Mildly Toxic Masculinity. He pouts whenever he doesn't feel other people are centering and deferring to him enough; he stomps around making other people clear up after his messes; he is just generally an extremely unpleasant version of his previous self, and I hope I remember not to go back to this one again soon. Especially when November is always there. And the others.

Shay Kauwe, The Killing Spell. This is an own-voices post-climate-apocalypse fantasy whose use of languages is, I think, much closer to what many of my friends wanted in Rebecca Kuang's Babel. Its character is part of a complex family and community whose relationships with each other did not ever get oversimplified. I really enjoyed it and hope it gets attention, because frankly I don't think the title and cover are doing it any favors.

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. I sure hope that Keefe has a good therapist and personal life, because he so consistently writes about such awful people. And one of the things that makes him very good at what he does is that he doesn't get drawn into the "glamor" of horrible rich people. But oof. Criminals and Russian oligarchs in contemporary London, terrifying but interesting and well done.

Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. This is a single essay in a beautifully published edition. It was published as a book because this is a former poet laureate, not because it in any way counts as an entire book. It's a reasonable enough essay but I'm glad the library had it because it would have disappointed me to spend money on it only to find the number of blank/ornamental pages.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death of an Author, Fell Murder, Post After Post-Mortem, and These Names Make Clues. Kindle. Lorac continues to write quite good Golden Age puzzle mysteries. The one I thought succeeded least here was the last of them. When your pen name is openly known to be an acronym (this is an author who is secretly a lady named Carol!!!), and then you title the book These Names Make Clues...having the names literally as clues is not a good mysterious mystery premise.

Sujata Massey, The Star from Calcutta. The latest in this series, and I think it's flagging a little but still worth having. This time it's gone into early filmmaking in India for its setting, which is fun and interesting.

Jo Miles, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit. A really cool exploration of this fruit throughout its range in the US, which does not include where I am, so it's interesting but from one step over. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in how produce gets bred and marketed and/or local fruits, definitely of interest.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Frankly much more useful in terms of interesting and provocative/inspiring essay writing about creative work. Lots of writers should read this and think about it.

D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Kindle. I continue my slow-motion comparison of epics from different parts of the world. This one was somewhat defensive about its tradition--but a lot of writing down of oral epics does come out that way.

Emmet A. O'Brien, Both Your Houses and Ever Vexed With Storms. Discussed (both books, separately) elsewhere.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Daughter Who Remains. Kindle. Coming full circle in this series, and for heaven's sake don't start here; you'll know if you've read the rest of the series and want this conclusion, and if you do I think it'll be satisfying.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. No actual centaurs were harmed in this Renaissance Italy fantasy novel. It's the second in its series and worth reading the first if you think you might be interested; artists and powerful families and religious figures abound. It's non-fantastical except for a divine possession that might be literal or might be a really intense metaphor. I like this kind of big historical novel and would like to find more.

Rebecca Roanhorse, River of Bones and Other Stories. Oh gosh am I glad this exists. Several favorite things and also some new-to-me things, hurrah for having them collected, hurrah.

Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There. This is a reasonable collection but not one of her absolute barnstormers. If you like her essays previously, you'll probably like this; if not, probably try another thing first to find out.

Kory Stamper, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color--From Azure to Zinc Pink. I thought this was going to be about colors, pigments, and dyes, and it is not, it is about the Merriam-Webster 3rd edition dictionary and the people who figured out how to define colors in words to their particular standards. Stamper is a vivid prose stylist, and this was interesting and not terribly long.

D.E. Stevenson, The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces. Kindle. These two are marked third and fourth in a series, but I would call them third and vaguely-related. They're both light middlebrow midcentury novels, and I enjoyed both, but only one is really stand-alone.

Molly Tanzer, And Side By Side They Wander. Molly's deep knowledge and love of art history really shines through in this novella, and she sets up her characters to ring changes on her theme very skillfully. It's one of the many novella cases where I wanted more room for them to do so, but I don't read the ending as very open to a sequel? I could be wrong. It's marketed as a heist and then the focus is very much elsewhere, which was fine with me, but if what you're looking for today is center-of-genre heist fiction, maybe read something else and come back to this a different day.

Jessie L. Weston, trans., Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four lais rendered into English Prose. Kindle. Weston did a bunch of translations of Arthuriana and similar eras of heroic poetry, and this volume is four Breton examples. If you're interested in more examples of that, here are some. If you're not, I wouldn't recommend them as the place to start or as particularly good exemplars.

cosmolinguist

The weather has been overcast and wet the last few days. But the strawberries still know that June is here.

Yesterday afternoon, V was outside inspecting the garden (as they do every day) and said the strawberries were a few hours away from being ripe.

And later, long after I'd forgotten they said this, they went out again and when they came back and handed me one red strawberry.

I ate it, delightedly. Well, I took a picture of it and then ate it. First Strawberry Day is like a holiday for me.

Today, when I was mired in work, they came in with a paper towel in their hand, which held another strawberry.

I told them I hoped they were getting some too. But only after I'd grabbed this one as well, heh. They said they hadn't yet.

I'm a little sheepish that my excitement about strawberries is so great that I am getting all the earliest fruits of their labor! But I know soon that there will be more of them in the fridge than any of us eat before more come along to join them.

oursin

Took my wonky knee to the GP this afternoon - the GP, as they are these days, appeared to be about 12 years old from my advanced perspective, but v competent, did a thorough interrogation and examination, and came to the conclusion that it looks very like a damaged meniscus -

- and guess what?

We treat that with PHYSIO! like what I am doing for other assorted bits of anatomy. They are sending letter to appropriate quarters and no doubt it will take 6 months at least to get an appointment.

***

In entirely other news:

An investigation into acts of self-pleasure among parrots and other birds has reached a climax, with the results providing welcome relief for vets and researchers, not to mention the birds themselves.
Bird keepers are often advised to discourage and even punish birds for masturbating, but the study found the activity was more common in the wild than in captivity, with researchers concluding it is part of a bird’s natural behaviour.

I am trying to recall what novel it was in which somebody mentions that the family have a canary (or maybe a budgie?) they have christened Onan because it scatters its seed upon the ground....

'Don't forget to ~~feed~~ pleasure the parrot!!!' (so that nature will not turn sour in its veins.)

maju

We had some unwanted drama here yesterday afternoon. Aria and Eden were playing out the back after dinner and apparently Aria got bitten by the next door neighbour's dog. (Aria is fine, now.) Both girls were traumatised, Aria by being bitten and Eden because she didn't know what to do. It seems the owner of the dog was trying and failing to get the dog under control. I didn't see any of it so I don't know exactly what happened. My son in law took Aria to urgent care but the first one they went to, just up the road, wasn't open so they had to trek further away. Luckily the second one was not only open but also empty, so they could be seen immediately. The bite is nothing too serious, and Aria didn't need a tetanus shot (which we had thought she might) because she is completely up to date with her vaccinations. My daughter had just landed at Newark airport when this happened, so I stayed here with Violet and Eden to wait for her while Aria and her father were gone.

Meanwhile, we were still waiting to have son in law's birthday party, which eventually happened after my daughter had arrived home and Aria and her father were back from the doctor, so around 7:30 pm. The first item on the agenda was breaking open the pinatas, which proved to be almost impossible. The girls and their father took turn after turn wacking at the first one with a small baseball bat and nothing happened. Eventually someone went and got a couple of croquet mallets; my son in law hit the pinata with the handle of one of those and, finally, the pinata split in half. We then came inside and had birthday cake and gift opening.

My poor daughter was exhausted from her week away, which included many very short nights, long days of listening to and learning from conference presentations, and late evenings of socialising/networking; she said she was asleep even before her head hit the pillow last night.

I finished my walk/run around the US yesterday afternoon; this was a goal I sometimes thought I would never reach. I started in December 2016 and at that time my projected finish date was sometime in 2027 but I guess I started running and walking slightly longer distances since I'm done a year earlier than that. I'm now working on "Run Around the UK and Ireland" which is just under 4000 km/2500 miles whereas the route around the US was more than 17000 km, so I hope to finish this one in two to three years. (I figure that because I'm older, I should work on shorter maps in case I run out of time on a longer one.)

hunningham

My mother has been looking up & memorising the number of British expats living in various different countries around the world. This is ammunition for an long-running battle about immigration with one of the neighbours. Woman at num 3 says ".. small boats crossing the channel..." My mother says " .. over 700 thousand British economic migrants in America should they all be sent home? Estimated up to a million British migrants in Spain and they don't make any effort to integrate or learn the language .. " I don't think the woman at num 3 will change her mind, but my Mum is enjoying herself. She also has strong opinions about the use of the word Expat which she will share whether or not you give her the chance.

Unfortunately she lost points on the surprisingly-progressive-old-person leaderboard when talking about British Jews & British Muslims and assimilation.

kiya

Countenance

I would say
This world
Is not crushing me
Yet

Except—

Every muscle
In my face
Is knots,
Like I live
In a wince
From the searing
Light
Of scrutiny.

And the pain
And the pull
Is wrecking
The sweetness
Of my voice.

Moooooood exhausted

lnr

Thank you for getting in touch to share your concerns about the revised EHRC Code of Practice which was laid before Parliament on 21st May.

As a Liberal Democrat, I am committed to respecting and defending the rights of everyone - including all LGBTQ+ people - and rejecting all forms of discrimination, wherever they happen.

I am deeply concerned that so many trans, non-binary and intersex people in our country were left feeling worried, fearful or uncertain after the supreme court ruling, and questioning whether they would be able to enjoy the same rights as their peers. The EHRC interim guidance that was published soon after the Supreme Court ruling did not in any way counter the anxiety, confusion and disruption surrounding how the ruling will be interpreted, and how it will work in practice. At this time I wrote to the Minister for Women and Equalities to convey these concerns and to press the government to show more leadership, provide more clarity and to ensure everyone’s rights are protected, including ensuring that the transgender community feels safe and do not face any discrimination.

It was essential that the new guidance issued by the EHRC gave individuals and organisations guidance that worked in practice and ensured that everyone was protected from harassment and discrimination. I do not think that the new Code of Practice meets this demand.

I completely understand the concerns of the transgender community who feel that they will be shut out of vital services, and unable to go about their daily lives and , worse still, will be at risk of harassment and victimisation. And many of my constituents also fear the risk of “gender policing”, where women can be challenged simply for not looking “feminine” enough. Businesses, societies and organisations are left worried about the costs of complying with the guidance and the legal challenges they may face.

I am pleased that Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey and Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Women and Equalities Marie Goldman MP have written to the Minister for Women and Equalities to convey these concerns, to urge that the guidance is withdrawn and that a cross-party committee of MPs be established to conduct a post-legislative scrutiny of both the Gender recognition and the Equality Act 2010, taking advice from all of those who have been impacted in order to propose new legislation or new guidance to ensure that existing rights are upheld and protected. Like them, I am committed to both women’s rights and transgender rights, do not agree that the two of these are in conflict and will continue to campaign for legislation and policy that upholds these rights and prevents discrimination in all of its forms.

Many thanks again for writing to me to share your concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Pippa

Pippa Heylings
Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire

mrissa

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

Zamyatin is a Recusant world. Its people have considered the advantages of membership in humanity's great interplanetary Hegemony and decided that oh gosh, no thank you, they're washing their collective hair that day. But there are dangers in the universe that do not play by the Hegemony's rules, so sometimes careful diplomacy with the Recusing worlds is required. Enter our heroine.

Corin Oshima is still outrunning the timewave resultant from altering the timeline around the horrible events of Rossem (before this series begins), but she is also dealing with the fallout from more recent events on Eisenhower (in Both Your Houses). Gangster Charlie Salamanca has gotten away, and in a world with extensive body modifications available, he could be anywhere--or anyone. But Corin can't focus on that right now. She's busy trying to make sure that neither Zamyatin nor its already-shaky relationship with the Hegemony is destroyed.

This series continues to be really excellent at its balance of thought and action. If you want space opera that considers the nature of the universe both morally and physically--now! with cool aliens!--this is the series for you. This is volume two, and I happen to know there's more to come. Yay.

oursin

Happy birthday,

sea_changed!

china_shop

Haaaai! I am just kind of floating through my day doing random stuff. To-do list? What's that? La la la.

I just spent an hour or more on Duolingo, which was a wrist-centric mistake after two hours' biking yesterday, so I've ordered a stylus in the hopes that'll make all the character-tracing easier. (Also, maybe faster for the timed sprint challenges?)

On Saturday we went to the NZ Art Show, which was uh, mostly crowded. It's hard to appreciate individual pieces in a very busy environment, with everything all crammed in together. The bright/garish pieces stand out, but anything quieter disappears. As always, my favourites were very children's-book-illustration-esque. We went round the whole place at a fair clip and were out in an hour.

And yesterday (Sunday), we biked Te Ara Tupua, the new separated cycleway/pedestrian-way to Pito-one (formerly, there was just the shoulder of the motorway). We continued along the foreshore and up the side of the river into Lower Hutt, had lunch at the Dowse Art Museum and a look around there, and came home again. The whole ride was about 43km. I bought some storage cubes (flat packed) which fit fine in our panniers and some cube packs. Still not really sure how to organise my stuff, but I have options.

Te Ara Tupua, which only opened a couple of weeks ago, was teeming with pedestrians and cyclists -- adults, kids, groups, etc. It felt like the city had been set free. I don't think I've seen so many smiles in my ten years of biking as an adult! It felt like a mix of seasoned cyclists, families with kids, and people who'd decided to take their bikes out of the garage, dust them off and give it a go. Really great. It took half an hour from Wellington railway station to Pito-one, and slightly longer back just because of the busyness of the path. :-)

nicki

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

redbird

Books finished:

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance. the book covers a lot, with a focus on Machiavelli and on Florence--The idea of a Renaissance, as a goal, was invented in Florence, and tourism has been important to the economy of Florence for centuries. Recommended.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Faith. A reread of a romance set in the Temple of the White Rat universe.

Celia Lake, Claiming the Tower. Another romance set in her Albion fantasy history, this takes place during the Crimean War, and the relationship arc is a slowly-developing friendship and then romance between two wonen.

Jenn Lyons, The Sky on Fire. A fantasy novel, set in a world with dragons. The main viewpoint character wanted to be a dragon rider, and instead found herself living on the barely-habitable surface, after what was intended to be been a fatal fall. Politics on multiple levels, as well as relationships. I enjoyed this and am not sure what to say about it. Lyons does a good job of world-building, with a lot of what Jo Walton calls including to avoid the "as you know, Bob" problem of telling the reader things that the characters take for granted. This seems to be a stand-alone book, and I have another of Lyons's books on hold at the library.

Susan Kaye Quinn, editor, Bright Green Futures. An anthology of solarpunk stories. These are mostly near-future stories about living in a climate-changed future, and adapting to aspects of that.

I liked most of the stories. Serena Ulibarri’s “What Kind of Bat Is This?” is about people working on studying and restoring a bit of desert. Danielle Arostegui’s “A Merger in Corn Country” is about farming and finding community as the climate changes and people have to decide whether to relocate. Brightflame’s "Ancestors, Descendants,” is weird and interesting, depicting a few people finding a way to live within a fungally-linked network of plant life at the northeastern edge of the continent (I think North America). “Centipede Station” by T K Rex is set much further in the future, somewhere a long way from Earth. It's anti two people whose starship has crash-landed on some kind of space station. Recommended, though I apparently tried and gave up on one of the author's novels a few years ago.

Celia Lake, Distilling Sunlight. Another Albion book, a romance between a widower with two children, and a woman who has never married, because she never met anyone she wanted to marry, and because she thinks her distractability and tendency to lose track of time would interfere with any serious relationship.

Holly Day, Squirrel Circus. A romance between two "shifters," one a wolf shifter (with a lot more control over the transformation than the typical werewolf, and a squirrel shifter. The two men can smell that they are each other's destined mates, and both think it would be a very bad idea, because wolves tend to kill and eat squirrels. I enjoyed this, but have no immediate impulse to seek out more of Day's work. We never see the titular squirrel circus, but it's a minor plot point. (This book, the Celia Lake romances, and the Courtney Milan book discussed below all contain explicit sex, but this one has an "adults only" warning at the beginning.)

Lois McMaster Bujold, Knot of Shadows. Another Penric and Desdemona novella.

Courtney Milan, A Compendium of Ever-Increasing Mayhem. Romance, and I'm not sure I entirely believe the characters getting together after the man ruined the woman socially years earlier, largely to amuse himself and his friends. (He has changed, but she has trouble believing that.)

Current reading:

I am reading what seems to be the new Penric and Desdemona story, Darklight Dare, on the kindle.

Our current read-aloud book is Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, translated by someone who liked the book enough that he learned French in order to translate it. (We compared this to another translation, and agreed that we preferred this one.)

kiya

Dramatis Personae:

Celyn, who is perhaps unfortunately in his element (chaos and fairy nonsense)
Robin, who wants to go home
with Greymalkin, who wants his wings back
Izgil, who wants to know things
Viepuck, who was falling back on faking it and improv

When we left the party we were deciding what to do after demolishing a redcap fortress.

( There were a lot of trophies in the trophy room, many of them grisly. )

Moooooood groggy

kaberett

Reading. Max Gladstone: I have finished Wicked Problems and am now most of the way through Dead Hand Rule, and have been remembering why it is that I'm feeling so much less fannish about these later books than the earlier ones. ( Read more... )

The library has just delivered unto my auxiliary internet device Fight Right (Julie Schwarz Gottman and John Gottman). I... cannot remember where I saw this recommended, I think in another piece of non-fiction I was reading but I can't remember what, so like... watch this space for how grumpy it makes me, I suppose?

Eating. Everything Has Been Too Warm, but: this week's most adventurous culinary wossname has probably, tragically, been The Protein Powder. Thus far I do not hate it but jury's out on whether it is actually a useful addition to my diet...

Exploring. I have been poking around new routes back from the gym and on my most recent journey found a delightful twisty little path including, among other things, walnuts.

Growing. ... I have watered the plants at home?

No, c'mon, self: the lemongrass is actually thoroughly established and I'm very pleased about it. The aubergines desperately need potting up but are also not dead. The poblano is fruiting merrily on the patio. Some things grow.

Observing. BATS: last night we heard something that might have been a soprano pip social call? Or might have been a noctule? We are not at all sure because we didn't get to hear much of it. But: bat!

wychwood

I'm splitting May in half because it's gone bonkers and I'll never get it posted otherwise.

( 89. Darksight Dare - Lois McMaster Bujold ) This series is very chill and delightful, and I do enjoy it even though it's not going anywhere terribly dramatic.

( 90. Platform Decay - Martha Wells ) A charming installment, and I think a reasonable place to stop if that's what happens.

( 91. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens and 92. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver ) Ultimately while these are both books about poverty and how easy it is for children to fall through the cracks, they have a very different feel to them. Both good, but in very different ways; I thought the Kingsolver especially was very good.

( 4 more Chalet School books - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) Chalet School!

( 94. The Faerie Queene vol 2 - Edmund Spenser ) Done! This was more of a slog than I anticipated from the first canto, but I'm glad to have read it.

( 95. Petty Treasons - Victoria Goddard ) Slight but effective and satisfying.

( 97. Inventing the Renaissance - Ada Palmer ) This was great; lots of historiography as well as actual history, but presented accessibly and interestingly. I hated her fiction, but I really enjoyed this.

( 98. Black Leopard Red Wolf - Marlon James ) Miserable, mean-spirited, ugh.

( 99. Wake Up, Nat & Darcy - Kate Cochrane ) I did like this as a romance! But it needed more development for me to believe they could stop the endless cycle of hurt and anger.

( 100. The Stardust Grail - Yume Kitasei ) I can't point to anything wrong, but this just never took off for me, sadly.

( 101. Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo ) I am slowly learning that I shouldn't buy things just because they're popular and only 99p.

( 103. Radiant Star - Ann Leckie ) Looking forward to re-reading.

Tuuuuuune Harmonium: Wild Nights - John Adams

crystalpyramid

I don't think posting is working?

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher, who is also my publisher, and Jo is a friend.

Ada is the heir not only to a duchy on another planet, but also a tradition of portal fantasy, beloved by many and written by her ancestor. She has spent her life striving for her stern, authoritarian grandfather's approval. The planet outside and its biological wonders have been last on her consideration list.

But when she runs into an old classmate who is trying desperately to get his botanical research in before the alien habitat is destroyed, she starts to question her assumptions about the planet outside--and about her ancestor's research for her beloved novels. What has she been missing all this time--and what did he miss generations ago? The richness of alien life is far beyond what she's seen before. Ada enters into a desperate race to convince her grandfather of the importance of beings beyond his assumptions and join in her classmate's efforts to find out more. If you love Narnia or rhizomes--or especially if you're like me and love both--this is for you.

cosmolinguist

I had a strange dream -- an older man I knew I'd been close to and was saying goodbye to knowing I'd never see him again -- that didn't literally include a loved one dying but once I woke up I was convinced that was what the dream was trying to tell me, about a specific person.

I don't think it's a premonition or anything, but it still felt unsettling in the early hours.

Not least because in waking up from it I managed to thrash around and knock over my alarm clock and water bottle next to my side of the bed and, in the process of picking them up again, kicked poor D in the shin as he lay newly-awake and startled in bed next to me.

I don't think I've ever had a premonition really, but I find such things so interesting.

I remember once when I was in high school my mom told us one morning she was convinced she'd heard a voice saying "Get ready" but she couldn't think of anything it would've been telling her to get ready for. She seemed a little taken aback as she was telling us this. And I don't remember anything happening soon after that would have explained it; we didn't find anything special that we needed to "get ready" for. These things probably happen so much more often than the few that do "line up" for some narrative. But we are pan narrans: we remember what makes a good story and what doesn't ends up as just static in the background.

Our pattern-matching brains find meaning where there isn't necessarily any, and pareidolia can be aural as well as visual. Our dreams are partly about filing away the information we have acquired and it isn't at all surprising for mine to highlight that a very old man who's been very ill for a long time might die. Dreams are still so little-understood, and sleep in general. More things than are dreamt of (so to speak): sleep paralysis and "exploding head syndrome" (which is the best explanation I've found for something that happened to me regularly as a kid; I used feel like I was waking up to the sound of a racecar zooming by).

Last year I read a book about the British premonition bureau and really enjoyed it.

But I really wouldn't have been surprised if I'd gotten an e-mail from my mom today telling me that Les had died. The feeling can be so strong, and feel so otherwise-inexplicable, that we think it must have been driven by some real event out there in the world. I think especially in times like this when we dream about someone dying we want to think that it's not just our brains conjuring up something awful, as if we've made it more likely by imagining such a terrible thing. As if we're bringing it into the realm of the possible. But I don't think any of that.

I do think it's a sign of how stressed and miserable I've been feeling for the last week, ten days. My mood just crashed hard near the end of last week for some reason.

I slept very well during the heatwave that I know disrupted a lot of people's sleep, but now that it's cooled down I'm the one taking up the burden of restless and wakeful nights. And shit like bad dreams -- especially ones that make themselves known in the waking world, even if it is having to make sure my alarm clock's okay and my boyfriend's shin isn't badly affected by me thwacking it -- just feels bad! It set me up for a bad morning: I had an argument with a security guard making it harder for me to get to transgym, I got disoriented on the way back because I had to exit a different way, during my post-gym shower I got shampoo in my eye (the "good" eye of course) and it hurt all day, I was sure I'd lost my bluetooth headphones... (luckily they did turn up later, but sheesh).

It feels like a lot of change is in the works for both me and my household, from our bodies to the literal structure around us, like solar panels and doors, and I think I've found that (understandably but very annoyingly) overwhelming.

Some of the chanfe has meant medically-necessary dietary changes which are not for me but are having an impact on me by making it even more stressful to plan/make dinner on work days (much less eat it).

Change is coming at work too: either I'll be a manager or I'll have a new manager (probably). Luckily the deadline for that has been extended from tomorrow to about a fortnight, so my indecisiveness and/or lack of executive function to pursue applying for it doesn't necessarily rule me out like I was beginning to worry it might.

oursin

Last week's bread held out pretty well, up until the point it became a dried out solid brick.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi goreng with yellow bell pepper and Calabrian salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: grated apple, with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour and maple syrup.

Today's lunch: baby carrots roasted in sunflower + toasted sesame oil, right at end sprinkled with sugar and mirin; baby courgettes white-braised with ginger rather than star anise, no sesame oil; green beans steamed with fennel seeds then tossed in olive oil + tarragon vinegar with a little chopped red onion; large flat mushrooms marinated for approx 30 mins in 50/50% tamari and mirin boiled with with a dash of sesame oil and star anise, then healthy-grilled for 5 minutes or so.

maju

I ended up going for another shortish walk (3 km/2 miles) in the afternoon yesterday while everybody else was out, and this morning before breakfast I walked 10 km/6 miles so now I have only 3 km/2 miles to cover and my virtual walk/run around the US will be finished. I was hoping to get it done later this morning, but I'm needed to be here with the girls while my son n law does grocery shopping for the week. I'll probably manage it this afternoon.

I was expecting to sleep well last night after all the kilometers I covered yesterday (20 altogether), but although I fell asleep quickly, I woke up after about an hour and then couldn't get back to sleep. Then at one point later in the night I woke up to find my right leg was sort of aching along the thigh, but I eventually managed to fall back asleep in spite of that, and by morning it was fine.

Today is my son in law's birthday, so the girls are planning some kind of party for him. After breakfast this morning I took Violet to Target where she stocked up on party supplies, and now the table is laid with party plates, cups, etc. (I thought we were going to Target so Violet could buy her father a gift, but she only bought a card.) Violet found some mini pinatas amongst the party supplies and she just had to buy a couple of those (they were so small she felt one wouldn't be enough), so then she had to buy small sweet things to fill them with. It's a shame my daughter is going to miss all this fun; she is in the air right now I believe, but won't be home until late this afternoon.

Because Violet is still only 10 she is supposed to sit in a booster seat, although it's something of a grey area since she is the size of a small adult, being over 5 feet tall. (And with feet the same size as my size 10s.) So she put a booster seat in my car but then found that her head was touching the roof of the car, so no booster for her for that trip. The family car is a minivan with a higher roof than my sedan, and the other car they use (Grammy's car) is a small SUV and also has a higher roof than my car, so she still sits in a booster seat in both of those.

Liv's pals

Countenance

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