I didn't go to look during the last week of June to see if Bloomingdale's did something for Pride like they'd done in previous years, but when I rode by June 22 and July 4 I didn't see any LGBTQIA+-related thing. I don't know if it was apathy or cowardice.
I've put up a ton of stuff on my Flickr since I last mentioned it: a lot of window displays (33 photos), some cemetery photos from May, a graduation photo, and a shot of hydrangea.
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I've been doing a lot of driving lately and working in a new-to-me fandom and have been getting so bunnied. It's been a long time since I've been spinning at this output. The night of July 4th, I got and wrote down a 600-word piece. And 1870 words on a WIP.
Encanto gen: “One Reason We Don’t Get Bruno Drunk” [@ AO3] RATING: PG-13. SUMMARY: It’s a funny story! Drunk Bruno swears it is! NOTES: Bruno’s language is saltier when he’s drunk with the “adults” than it is in my other fics. Thank you to akira17 for beta.
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I've been watching My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! [Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranain Desu ga]. A school bus from Japan arrives in another world ruled by a sage who kills the adults and claims the students will train as sages. But one student, Takatou Yogiri, already has a power....
The massive body count would usually bother me, but so many of the characters are such murderous a-holes that I'm often saying, "Die," along with Takatou. Sometimes even before him. It's self-defense every time. Sane people who heard about someone who could kill people instantly would not mess with the guy, especially when he just wants them to leave him and his companion alone as they travel, but these folks are determined to poke the bear, often while giving some long arrogant speech. This show could be used as an illustration for "fuck around, find out."
I don't entirely like the show but find it weirdly entertaining?
Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."
Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.
Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.
There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.
In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.
My wife found my PostSecret that you put up this Sunday and I was a little scared. She cried and told me it was the sweetest thing she has ever been a part of.
I sent it before we got married.
The young woman I speak of on the cards and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary last October and have an amazing 4-year-old that completes our beautiful family.
PS. . . I’m no longer scared that she knows all my secrets.
Well, spoiler alert… Ranunculus fits just fine. This was not at all a guarantee, despite the rather ridiculous number of times that I checked before binding off and going back to do the neck. I felt compelled to pop back and tell you all how it was fitting, not just because I mentioned that I was worried it was going to be too short, but because the very last picture I posted of it on instagram looked like this.
Let’s back up to how I got there – which I admit was a very dramatic moment – one where I went to pull a finished sweater over my head and lo, it did not go. On the upside, I did stop worrying about the length for a while. Here’s what happened. I told you all in the last post that since I changed the gauge on this sweater (I went down a needle size or so to make a fabric I like better. What the heck, it’s my sweater.) That meant though, that I wasn’t at all sure how many I wanted to cast on for a top down sweater, so I skipped it. I cast on provisionally after the neck, and just started working the sweater. When I was done, I came back, picked up all the stitches, and worked the neckband.
Here’s the thing though. Did I do any figuring? Did I follow up on my original thought and have a little chat with my inner knitter about how I was worried it would be too small because I went down a needle size, and perhaps reflect upon how none of that had changed? Yeah verily, did I look upon the knitting and think “Well Stephanie, this is exactly the moment one knits a swatch for” and having though that, picked up the swatch that I did indeed knit, and count how many stitches it would take to go around my noggin? Did I?
No, gentle knitter, I did not. Even though the swatch sat nearby, even though (sort of unbelievably) I had a tape measure nearby… nope. I just took a look at that neckline and decided to just smash the question with the weight of my experience and thought “Looks right.” and just went for it. It was not right. (See above.)
Anyway, obviously I ripped back the cast on, and all the ribbing, and then I did the math and NOW this sweater both goes over my head and …
It is the right length. I knew it.
Sweater: Ranunculus, Yarn; (Cottage Fingering, 50% Merino, 20% Linen, 15% Silk, 15% Cotton) Modifications, changed the gauge, provisional neckline, fewer stitches for the neckband itself – oh, and I only did the short rows in the back, and I made them wider. It fits me better that way.
For now, I’m off to bed. Jen and I are going on a training ride in the morning, and I have to get up at 5:30am to make it happen, and that is not a thing that is really in my wheelhouse without getting to bed early. If I survive, I’ll pop back and tell you a story about some socks.
(PS. If you wanted to sponsor me or Jen tomorrow to encourage two rather old soft women to ride like the wind, you can do it by clicking on our names. We start to ride at 7, and can use whatever encouragement you can offer. )
The number of times recently when I was reading the cover copy summary of a fantasy book and get interested in the plot... and then it gets to the part about the protagonist's attraction to so-and-so and I realize it's a romantasy and put it down... way too many. And it's almost always a dark, illicit, or unwanted attraction.
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My left ankle is doing well! It barely hurts. I left off the compression/support sleeve altogether today because it was making the top of my foot hurt and I was fine. I'm looking around and walking much more carefully and with more awareness though.
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I tried the first episode of season 1 of Peacemaker and bounced off it hard. I didn't even make it all the way through the first half. Didn't like the characters, didn't like the tone, it didn't make me care.
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My current WIPs are Encanto. No idea if anybody here is reading my Encanto fics, but it's what I'm doing.
This book fought me. There were so many times I nearly put it down for good, but some online reviews said it got much better at about 50% of the way through so I slogged on. It does pull off something pretty cool at the end, enough for me to raise the rating from "did not like it" to "it's okay" but not enough for me to rate it higher or feel like the effort to get there was entirely worth it.
There are some great scenes! Punctuated by long stretches where I was so bored. How could a book about a lesbian highwaywoman seeking revenge on the industrialist who had her family and friends murdered when she was a child--only she survived the massacre--have boring stretches? And yet.
The writing is florid and sometimes nearly blurry. Metal from Heaven's main viewpoint character often sees the world somewhat off because she's deeply allergic to ichorite, a metal that she was exposed to a lot at the foundry she and her family had worked at that is now being laced into everything. When close to it or in contact with it, it hurts her body in many ways as well as overlays a nearly hallucinogenic slant to everything she sees. ( spoiler )
It might've been nice having more POVs than just hers.
This book throws a lot of superfluous details at you... then reveals much later on that not all of it was superfluous. Some transitions were abrupt and awkward. There are so many names in this--people, places, religions--that it can be hard to keep track of who is who and what is what, so an appendix would've been nice.
Some of the twists were very clever, but one major one absolutely failed at my suspension of disbelief. I was not able to go along with it.
The Earth is ruled by the authoritarian Mandate, which like all such governments is constantly alert for threats to its stability. This extends to its scientific research: although the Mandate has explored space and discovered a number of exoplanets (a few of which have some form of life), it still insists that scientific discoveries must support the philosophy of the Mandate, which holds that human beings are the pinnacle of creation and that other life forms must all be in the process of striving to achieve that same state of being.
Ecologist and xeno-ecologist Arton Daghdev chafes against both these mental manacles and the Mandate in general. Some time before the story opens, he becomes part of a cell of would-be revolutionaries. After discovery of his improper views and rebellious actions, he is sentenced to what is meant to be a short life assisting research on the planet Imno 27g, casually known as Kiln for the strange clusters of pottery buildings scattered over its surface.
Life as a prisoner on Kiln within the research enclave is brutal in all the ways any such prison can be, when the prisoners are nothing but human-shaped machinery to accomplish the goals of their jailers. The Mandate's leadership has absolute control over who among their prisoners lives or dies, and if anyone should harbor the intent to escape, the environment outside the base is all too lively. The death rate among the workers is appalling, but new shipments of convicted crooks and malcontents arrive all the time, so it hardly matters.
None of the weird aliens seem to be builders of the sort needed to create the clusters of mysterious structures or indeed intelligent in any way beyond, perhaps, the level of social insects on Earth. Yet somehow the small, dysfunctional cadre of scientists on Kiln must serve up the desired tidbits of discovery to keep their commandant happy with them: evidence that there once were intelligent humanoids on Kiln.
I am an emotional person, and I want to like at least some of the characters about whom I'm reading. Daghdev is prickly, snarky, and fatalistic — but then, he has cause. He's also an unreliable narrator who only reveals to the reader what he wants, when he wants. The situation is really excruciating: people with a deep dislike of body horror might want to avoid this book. And there is not, in fact, a happy ending (at least not IMO).
On the other hand, this is very well written. For me, it moved along at a fantastic clip, and when I went back to check some particulars for this write-up, I found myself reading far more than I had intended because the story caught me up again. Some of the scientific ideas reminded me of other works (Sue Burke's Semiosis surfaced in my thoughts a couple of time), and sometimes I was reminded of something more elusive, a source that I can't recall. Does anyone else who has already read this have thoughts on the book's likely ancestors?
From my viewpoint, this was one of the most "science fictional" of this year's finalists. I think it might be my first choice in the vote.
This may be the most challenging secret I have ever had to decipher. I think to understand the full confession we need to reassemble these strips. Is it possible? Could AI help? Post your ideas and solutions here. Thanks!
Today while I was out, a food bank truck at a church was bringing down a pallet that had stacks of large boxes of avocados, maybe 30 or more, and somehow the boxes tipped over sideways. Some hit the street and sent individual avocados flying out across Caldwell and Eliot Avenues. Some boxes fell on top of other boxes and smushed them. In 95F heat and sun. I was so tempted to take a photo, but I figured this guy was already having the worst workday of his life without him seeing me documenting it and knowing I'd show it to other people. (I also feel bad for the people who would've eaten those avocados if not for this accident.)
I wonder how many avocados were salvageable.
Probably not the one that rolled several hundred feet and into the crosswalk at the intersection.
I can only hope someone got the idea to make guacamole out of the wreckage so they're not totally wasted.
The podiatrist cleared me to get out of the boot and walk about with a compression brace/support and a regular shoe, which is a relief since that boot was monstrously hot in this weather. Also, the fracture crack is about 90% filled in now. She says the ankle will still feel tender for another week or two, that's normal.
She didn't think I needed physical therapy though she asked if I wanted it. Having done physical therapy twice a week since February for the car accident neck stuff, I'm so ready for a break from PT for a while. It sounds like I'm about to be kicked off the no-fault coverage for it, so that's coming soon. I don't have resistance bands, but I know some of the exercises for ankles I could otherwise do at home.
I did tell everybody that it was far from the worst sprain I ever had. I mostly worried about the fractured bone.
I've now read all the finalist novels for the 2025 Hugo Awards. The trouble is, I read some of these books when they first came out last year. Still. I'm happy to share my impressions if people are interested.
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viridian5
I didn't go to look during the last week of June to see if Bloomingdale's did something for Pride like they'd done in previous years, but when I rode by June 22 and July 4 I didn't see any LGBTQIA+-related thing. I don't know if it was apathy or cowardice.
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