osprey_archer | Reading

Apparently I have not posted about The Night Eternal since the start of 2025, which is insane, since in the whole intervening time they have been pretty much my favourite band after Iron Maiden. Their style - melodic, mournful heavy metal framed around themes of incredibly campy dark occultism - gets better the more I listen to it. In the last eighteen months I have played both albums to death and beyond, and now they have a new one slated to release in August!!! I'm so excited. Here is the first single they've just released, inspired - so the band say in their release statement - by Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time:

Watch on YouTube

And they're touring Europe with Messa! I am expiring from envy. I am sinking down into the netherworld to wallow in a pit of jealous, yearning darkness.

In other musical news, I've been getting back into classical lately. This is great because it gives me something to talk about with my dad, and also because there is SO MUCH glorious Christian music out there for which I'm now able to develop whole new nuances of appreciation. I've been aiming for variety, but I keep just wanting to relisten to Verdi's Requiem, which has got to be the most heavy metal piece of music in the world that contains not a single electric guitar. Go on. Listen to Dies Irae and tell me you do not feel moved to headbang even a little bit.

Other current favourites include Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (so beautifully dark and dissonant!) and Chopin's Nocturnes. I've also been listening to the Brandenburg Concertos a whole bunch trying to force myself to Get(TM) Bach; I would not say I'm quite there with the Getting(TM) yet, but they are undeniably impressive.

A few nights ago I watched La bohème, the 1988 Pavarotti and Freni video recording. Growing up this was one of my sister's favourite operas (not mine - I was always more of a Mozart girlie) and it's so so funny to experience it again now and see the indelible imprint it has left on her fannish tastes. This woman LOVES herself a good pure, angelic woobie dying slowly and tragically of an incurable disease while the whole assembled cast look on and weep. Always has done, always will do. Meanwhile I am a heartless monster who was impatient for Mimi to just kick the bucket already. Musetta was so much more likable. I also very much enjoyed the scenes of the men clowning around, finding moments of joy in the midst of their desperate poverty. It's gritty, grounded storytelling by operatic standards. But I think next time I watch a full opera, I will go for something by Mozart.

asakiyume

One cool thing I did on my last trip to Leticia was visit a foundation that a woman (Johana) had set up, all on her own, to take care of stray dogs and cats (but especially dogs) in Leticia. Of which there are many. She has two locations where she houses the animals she takes in, and I got to visit one.

--And I want to take a moment to say, Johana not some wealthy woman doing this with her spare pesos. No: she's one of Colombia's many many internally displaced people, who, with her parents, had to flee her home due to the civil war (which was mainly, but not 100 percent entirely, brought to a close in 2016). She ended up in Leticia. What I'm saying is, she started with nothing, no anything.

She takes animals in--again, mainly dogs--and a lot of time they're in pretty rough condition, but she nurses them back to health, and then they are as healthy and happy/bouncy as any dog you could imagine. If you can tolerate looking at pictures of a very poorly-off dog if you know at the end you are going to see pictures of a happy, healthy dog, this video montage from the foundation's Instagram shows the healing.

She also arranges sterilization clinics that people can bring their pets to--and it's free. There was one going on during the time I was there, and the receptionists at the place where I was staying knew about it and knew about the foundation.

So one evening I hopped on the back of L & R's motorbike, and we visited one of those houses. The mural was painted by volunteers from a local cell phone carrier:

whitewashed wall with dogs painted on it and doggie footprints

whitewashed wall with dogs painted on it and doggie footprints

a canvas sign showing a pair of wings around a heart holding a dog's paw

There were so many dogs! So many! I didn't get a picture, but here is one from the Instagram:

a bunch of very happy-looking dogs

( three more photos under the cut )

Johana has trouble getting dogs adopted out because there are so many dogs in Leticia, and someone's dog is always having puppies. But she's committed to taking care of those she can't find homes for. Needless to say, all this takes funds, and Leticia is not Cartagena. There aren't bunches of wealthy people around. I promised a donation when I got home (she has a PayPal account for overseas donations), and I said I'd spread the word on social media.

People who donate to animal shelters are, in my experience, super generous, but also they already have many, many places they donate their funds. BUT. If you are such a person, and if maybe it would tickle your fancy to support a very underresourced animal shelter in the Amazon, here is your chance.

To pay by PayPal, go to PayPal, and type @ fundacion09 --but all closed up.
(If I type it closed up here, it will end up pointing to a nonexistent Dreamwidth account.)
[Thank you

sovay for pointing out this problem!]

And this is a link to the Instagram post that gives that information.

And lastly, here's a link to the overall Instagram

Current Music: Shakira: Dai Dai

sovay

Good Monday! I slept an hour and have to fight with both my insurance and the city parking department. Have a small number of links.

1. Thanks to the ongoing movement to eat the invasive green crab, I have discovered the existence of Maine Garum. Of course I want to order a bottle of their fish sauce; I haven't had garum in the kitchen since our last apartment. Then I want to order their crab sauce, because intense oceanic funk is most attractive to me.

2. Since I last checked in on Dermot Turing, he has produced two books of obvious interest to me: Enigma Traitors: The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War (2023) and Misread Signals: How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers (2025). The first makes me hope he has written about Leo Marks and Englandspiel, the second is right on.

3. Have a photoset of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton outside a pub in Shepperton, 1963. They are obviously in the middle of filming Becket (1964) and just as obviously are the modern AU. "He's drunk and wenched his way through London, but he's thinking all the time."

I have draft schedules for both Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. I like the looks of both of them. Wish my constitution luck.

Current Music: Joy Oladokun, "Nothing Comes Easy"

sholio

I was answering a comment over on AO3 on my old Stargate fic Old Soldiers Die Hard, the one with Annie the candystriper viewpoint OC, and got to thinking about the elapsed time since I posted it in 2006. She was probably meant to be in her late teens in the story, something like 17 or 18, which means that if she aged in realtime, she'd be in her late 30s now.

I was thinking about this in particular because it was always one of my most popular fics in that fandom, and people often asked for a sequel to that story about Annie grown up (and still do now and then). I don't mind being asked, although it is definitely not happening because I've long since moved on, but it's a bit wild to consider the passage of time in that particular way.

(Annie is grown up and doing fine, btw.)

silverusagi

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

Current Mood: tired

sartorias

I am not used to this kind of humidity, but wow the greenery is just so stunning!

Look at this dogwood outside my window:

And these iris just growing along someone's driveway, so innocent, ho hum:

And just . . . GREEN

Then there is equally charming not-green . . .

sovay

For the seventy-second yahrzeit of Alan Turing, it feels inevitable that I should find AI tools incorporated into the creation of opera and sculpture about his life. The flaw in the imitation game is not the mimicry of the machine, but the mirror test of humanity which has such difficulty recognizing itself to begin with. How much more readily the present of this future ascribes personhood to an app than acknowledges it in a rainbow. No chatbot has ever been as queer as the Manchester University Computer. His ideas on computability are still investigated and his reaction–diffusion systems turned into art and I can't remember knowing that a road had been named after him in 1994. When Alan imagined a child-machine, he included the concern that it would be made fun of at school. It was never necessary to share a taste for strawberries and cream.

Current Music: Rabbitology, "Sweet Death of Me"

raven

I’ve been feeling some kind of a way about this story! I’m reluctant to say I Am Writing Again, because this felt like a huge struggle and would’ve been impossible without the week on Shetland. But here it is, and I’m glad I’ve written it.

Also, if you’re not familiar, I really think you could read this one as an original m/m short story, no canon required. The tiny bit of backstory goes like this( goes like this )

No spoilers for the show here.

slung from the mast, a lantern (6075 words) by raven
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh & Jimmy Perez
Characters: Jimmy Perez, Duncan Hunter, Sandy Wilson, Alison McIntosh, Cassie Perez (Shetland)
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, why is "co-parents to lovers" not a canonical tag

Every few minutes Jimmy’s feet leave the ground, and it’s only Duncan’s weight that keeps him down. It’s terrifying, every time it happens. All of this, suddenly, is terrifying.

(Or––Jimmy grieves, Duncan loves him, things work out okay in the end)

sholio

I finished that Season 5 AU WIP! Finally!

The Living and the Damned (23K, Londo/G'Kar, mature-rated)
Fixit (of sorts) going AU in 5x18.

Some thoughts on writing WIPs under the cut (not spoilery for this fic in particular, more like general musings).

( Under here )

I don't know - what do you all think? Do you post WIPs? Do you read WIPs? It's been a long time since I've been in a fandom that had a lot of WIPs, prior to getting into Murderbot last year, which is almost like old-school ffn/LJ fandom with its very high number of WIPs. Including a lot of unfinished ones! And that's part of what got me back into posting some of my longer fic in WIP form, because there is a certain excitement and energy to it that I miss. Plus, in non-fandom spaces, I've enjoyed serialized media for a very long time (comics, webcomics, TV shows, etc). But it is obviously not without its down side, and I don't think I was prepared for how much trouble I was going to have finishing things when they're being written WIP-style.

sovay

I had entertained fantasies of attending Pride, especially since I can really get behind the theme of protesting since 1776, but what I actually had the energy for was imitating a pancake. Eventually I gathered enough verticality to walk around the neighborhood and make hot dogs for dinner. TCM gladdened my heart by running The Sea Wolf (1941). I have not enjoyed the news about either Marjane Satrapi or Anthony Stewart Head. In lieu of a parade, I wore the rainbow cat T-shirt my godson handed up to me.

Current Music: Houndmouth, "Tiger Blood"

troisoiseaux

Finished Famesick by Lena Dunham, which I really.... enjoyed does not feel like the right word, because it is basically a memoir of getting chewed up and spit out by the fame machine at the same time as she was suffering from chronic health issues and struggling with substance abuse and she apparently just has godawful taste in and/or luck with men, but it is an engaging and - despite the heavy content - frequently funny read. Prominently features various celebrities who I'd say I was abstractly aware of as famous people who exist, but I found that this didn't necessarily change my opinion of, say, Jack Antonoff or Adam Driver— like, not in the sense that I don't credit Dunham's narrative, it's just that my brain did not really connect my indignation over Dunham's increasingly selfish/useless boyfriend to that guy from that band, or the coworker who sounds like a walking red flag (but, even in her own memoir a decade later, she seems more enamored with than put off by??) with that guy from that movie, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Mostly, I think, because I didn't really have preexisting opinions about any of said famous people; I enjoy the music of both fun. and Bleachers, but 100% could not pick Antonoff out of a lineup of white guys in hipster glasses.)

Read Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, technically a 1950 fictionalization of WWII's Operation Mincemeat— a deception operation to convince the Nazis that the Allies planned to invade Sardinia, not Sicily, by way of "secret" plans planted via dead British officer washing ashore in Spain; in recent years, the subject of a book, a movie, and a musical— although only the last ~20 pages (of 155) have anything to do with/map onto the story of Operation Mincemeat (which was still classified in 1950, although Cooper apparently learned of it from Churchill as dinner gossip and Ewen Montagu published his own account only a few years later). Instead, it is mostly the pretty bleak life story of one Captain William "Willie" Maryngton (barely filing the serial numbers off of Mincemeat's faked Major William Martin here), a born and bred soldier with the misfortune of being too young for WWI and too old to be shipped to the front in WWII, who finally achieves his life's goal of seeing "action" only after he dies of pneumonia and is used in a deception operation to convince the Nazis that etc. etc. Can't really put my finger on the tone, beyond bleak— the dialogue frequently has the gung-ho feel of a propaganda film, but I feel like there's kind of a cynical edge, overall? The most interesting character in this is actually Willie's foster brother Horatio "Horry" Osborne, the son of a military family who pursues his dream of becoming an actor instead, but— after a lifetime of insisting that the Army wasn't "going to get [him] in their clutches"— immediately joins up when WWII breaks out, motivated by his "profound hatred of injustice and cruelty," and is almost as quickly killed in battle. (RIP Horry.)

It's interesting to compare what we know now about the IRL Operation Mincemeat to Cooper's fictional Operation Heartbreak: in the novel, Maryngton's death provides the operation with a ready-made cover story, vs. the real-life work that went into carefully constructing an identity, down to the pocket litter. (Although someone does still write a love letter to send off with him: in this case, the secretary who does so is the aforementioned Horry Osborne's younger sister! Who Willie has been in love with for years! And had in fact recently turned down his proposal!) On another interesting note, the afterword on the IRL Operation Mincemeat, written circa 2004, dismisses Glyndwr Michael— the "real" Major Martin, an unhoused man from Wales who died (whether intentionally or accidentally) from poison— as a possible identity for the body used, positing that "a postmortem might have discovered [his real cause of death] and the risk would have been too great." Happy to pass this along to anyone who'd like to read it, btw, otherwise it's going to local little free library.

sartorias

Currently on writing retreat at Union Pier in Michigan, and am utterly charmed at the concept of rain in June. Rain! In June! No wonder these trees are such a deep, deep green!

Little actual writing done as I've been laboring at Worldcon tasks, specifically the tetris of scheduling the writing panels. All zillion of them--which means juggling participants whose schedules might clash with times and places. Not a thing I am good at, whew, not at all.

Today I hope to get some actual writing done. So close to finishing off a piece, so close, the images swim in my mind.

thisbluespirit

Before I had the cold (which is not entirely over, but is much better now) I had a few things I was going to put into a post. They are now extremely random, mostly belated, and not equal, so apologies for a motley post, but I did want to note:

1.

beccadg is having a lot of health issues and has a GoFundMe.

2. I saw two posts about Small Prophets, one talking about the influence of all the stopmotion children's animation in it, and another person saying that whatever you'd call the exact inverse of English folk horror, that's what Mackenzie Crook's work is. All of which smashed together in my head to make me go: OMG, he made Bagpuss for adults! (I mean, it's not, but also it is. And Bagpuss is also some sort of exact inverse of 70s folk horror, too. Artisanal children's TV in terms of being literally crafted by hand and its simple but beautiful storytelling structure.)

3. Before I got too ill to do such radical things as watch TV on my PC again, I managed to actually watch ep1 of Miami Medical (with Jeremy Northam and Lana Parrilla), and discovered that when you watch a full ep instead of just Lana clips, what's up with Jeremy Northam's accent is much clearer, in that it was never meant to be a US accent, just that his character had been working in Maryland for 10 years and the "I'm from Maryland, as you can tell by the accent" was actually ironic. Someone calls him "Mr Tea and Biscuits" in the next scene. (Most of the eps are there. Hopefully I shall be able to watch them sometime and all will become clearer than the random Lana snippets.)

4.

sovay pointed me to uploaded episodes of The Expert on YouTube, including 2 from 1971 that I had managed to miss featured... James Maxwell! \o/ I was even too ill to manage watching this on my tablet for ages, too.

In true JM form he was very nervy and awkward and also unfortunately too gentle and unmanly to survive a small push in the 1970s. Alas. He is such a delicate 6"3 baritone flower, lol. He fell over in the beginning of part 2 and next thing I knew they were doing an autopsy on him and now I'm too worried about where this is going to watch the rest (yet). (The channel also seems to have a lot of rare stuff - this is a never released on DVD or repeated item, so they must have a collection of their own, presumably.)

5. Bookending this, Michael Keating, better known to me as Vila from Blake's 7 died when I was too numbed from the cold to really comment on it - and then yesterday, the news broke about Anthony Head, too, and I was very sad to hear both & both by all accounts, lovely people too. Michael had apparently had dementia for some years and after B7 worked mainly in theatre, and also got very into rambling, but he didn't need to do more TV to leave an impact: Vila was iconic, someone he made a very likeable and relatable figure in the midst of all the rebels vs. Federation struggles. I'm watching Sesskasays react to B7 for the first time and, in these early stages, Vila is her favourite. Mine too. I love all the characters, and adored Jacqeline as Servalan, but Vila is my favourite. He's the 'small man' archetype out of a fantasy story, living in a snarky fascist space universe. How could he not be?

I was late to the party with Buffy (although I remember watching the Gold Blend ads as a child!) but as a newbie librarian, I borrowed the VHS tapes from our library, and Giles was of course immediately my favourite, and then Anthony Head was always marvellous in everything. I hadn't dreamed we weren't going to get a few more years yet of unexpected bonus ASH in random TV or radio. He was in DW (audio and visual), Jonathan Creek's pilot, Cabin Pressure, but 3 things other than Giles I'll remember him for, particularly:- his first TV appearance in Enemy at the Door, where he played the Martels' son Clive, trapped on the island after a misguided raid by the British army goes wrong; an outstanding performance in s1 of Spooks, where he played Tom Quinn's mentor, jaded and screwed up, in a tragic crash-and-burn guest turn (N.B. warning for all the things, this is Spooks); and at the other end of the scale, being absolutely marvellous and hilarious every episode of 5 series of Bleak Expectations as the villainous Mr Gently Benevolent, whether exercising his trademark evil laugh, reincarnated as a pigeon, reformed, unreformed, or cheeseboarding Pip (with a break for tea and biscuits). It got me through a rough summer in 2013. Washing up badly is not the same as washing up evilly.

sovay

For six years I did not see

ladymondegreen except through a screen, so it was especially lovely to meet them in the bright hot afternoon by Spy Pond and catch up on the respective ways we had managed not to die since last we compared notes, after which it planlessly evolved that we repaired to my parents' house and ended up cooking a suitable dinner with interludes of watering the irises and the alyssum, touring the art in the house with my father, and lying around on the couch. Late in the evening

akawil and

pecunium came by to collect their spouse and talk programming and rocks with my parents and my mother had to kick all of us out into the night before her natural nocturnal clock ticked over to the point where she woke up. We are resolved to keep not dying so that it need not be another six years before we share a view of the water.

Current Music: Levyosn, "A Bletele Vert a Bletl"

skygiants

In addition to all the Perns, I have also been reading some non-Pern McCaffreys! At this point this includes:

The Ship Who Sang, in which a young woman gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, loses the thing she cares about most in the world, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in her manipulative boss

Crystal Singer, in which a young woman loses everything she cares about in the world, gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and, despite not seeking a life partner, nonetheless enters into a romance with her manipulative boss

The Rowan, in which a young woman with beyond-human powers loses everything she cares about in the world, gets indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in the guy who at the end of the book succeeds to the position held by her manipulative boss

Obviously all of these books have their own unique points of distinction:

The Ship Who Sang kicked off generations of what-if-a-girl-was-a-ship stories and also generations of disability-in-SF conversations; it is also IMO one of the most interesting of McCaffrey's structural experiments, being composed of short stories that do generally work well as short stories, while creating a coherent and connected character arc for Helva across the whole set. Also: women! Helva gets to partner with women! Does she want to partner with women? Absolutely not. She wants a hot guy, or, failing that, a weird little manipulative boss who's obsessed with her. But nonetheless while waiting for her inevitable manipulative bossmance she has some interesting women thrust upon her, which I appreciate even if she does not.

The Rowan is the latest, structurally the weakest, and I think perhaps generally the worst of these books ... Killashandra has a bad personality and it's charming, but the Rowan's bad personality mostly comes out in the context of being a bad boss within her devil's-bargain corporation, which is less charming. Also there's sort of a halfhearted attempt at an evil aliens are attacking plot but the evil aliens take up approximately ten (10) whole pages of the book because McCaffrey finds them much less interesting than the Rowan's boyfriend, who is of course destined for her because he's the only hot guy telepath who's more powerful than she is. Anyway, the funniest part about this book is the fact that the Rowan gets a telepathic cat in the first section, and because everyone loves a telepathic cat the telepathic cat is on the front cover of the book, but then Anne McCaffrey is like 'yeah but she left the telepathic cat on the spaceship the first time she left home, they weren't actually that tight' and the telepathic cat is never mentioned again.

Crystal Singer is notable for the fact that Killashandra -- in addition to being a failed opera singer who has to pivot to harvesting addictive crystal with the power of her voice -- is the meanest and most self-interested McCaffrey heroine and also the one who has the most casual sex. A real delight to go from Avril Bitra in Dragonsdawn to Killashandra, who has all of Avril Bitra's traits except she's protagonist-shaped so instead of performing sexy torturemurder and getting fired into the sun, she reluctantly saves the life of a guy who hates her, complaining about it all the way. God bless! Has the most opportunities not to enter into a devil's bargain with a corporation to become a protagonist, and also has arguably the worst devil's bargain of the lot (crystal singing rots your brain! creepy!) and so I think is in many ways central to the Corporate Devil's Bargain thesis of it all: the subtext of The Ship Who Sang and The Rowan is that yes, the devil's bargain Is worth it, but Crystal Singer holds it up defiantly and makes it text. Yes, you were probably manipulated into it, and yes, it's going to end in tragedy, but look how cool you are now!

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa, the OG bad personality heroine herself, and her arc in Dragonflight. It's more obviously a devil's bargain when it's a Big Corporation and not a cool dragon that loves you unconditionally -- but what are all these sexy manipulative bosses, except proof that Big Corporation actually loves you unconditionally? And yes, you were manipulated into it. No, you can't leave now that you've done it. Yes, the institution takes away your agency, by design, but broadly speaking, it's a benevolent institution -- or at least, society can't do without it. Anyway, now that you're part of this institution, you are now the coolest person in the world; everyone needs you, admires you, loves you, and you're happier than you've ever been. Of course it was worth it!

sineala

While I have the brain energy, I figured I would repost a useful resource for my fellow writers using Scrivener, namely that someone on the r/scrivener subreddit has made dozens of free Scrivener themes for both Mac and Windows versions of Scrivener, if you would like to change up the color scheme of Scrivener a bit. (There's also a guide to Scrivener's Compile system there, if you need one.)

As a Mac user, this is exciting, because the Mac and Windows themes for Scrivener are not cross-compatible and I am pretty sure that every other Scrivener theme I have ever seen available for download is for the Windows version. But these come in Mac versions too! Now I can finally have a selection of pretty colors to choose from!

(This is also doubly exciting because the person who was making them was taking suggestions as they were posting them in packs to the subreddit and I asked if they could please make a version of the Cobalt2 IDE theme and they made a Cobalt2 IDE theme! For me! It's pretty great. I understand that not everyone wants Scrivener to look like their favorite VSCode or JetBrains theme, but I love this theme a lot, so.)

Current Mood: creative

sholio

Just started book 7 (This Inevitable Ruin).

( Random spoilers )

chestnut_pod

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

Current Mood: accomplished

lucymonster

The Employees by Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken: This Danish novella tells the story of a corporate space expedition gone wrong through a series of transcribed statements from employees aboard the ship. The statements are framed as having been given to a review team sent by the head office; no further context is supplied, except what can be pieced together from the statements themselves. The employees comprise natural born humans and lab-made cybernetic individuals called humanoids. Conditions are dire; both kinds of employee are effectively slaves, and devotion to the company has been deeply embedded in their psyches. Despite this, a rudimentary sort of rebellion is fomenting. The higher-ups have been rolling out a series of cheap, easily scalable technologies designed to paper over the catastrophic emotional wounds they are inflicting on their workforce, the latest of which are a mysterious set of objects from an alien planet that seem to exert some sort of lulling effect on people who get close to them. This ends about as well as anyone who doesn't sit on a board of directors could have told you from the start.

So basically, this story is a critique of late capitalist office culture. The message is not exactly subtle, but the trappings are so enthrallingly weird and creative that it ends up feeling like a lot more than the sum of its parts.

And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas: This is a memoir by an established travel writer and devout Anglican who spends a year trying to become a nun. My first temptation is to scrutinise whether she really meant to be a nun or had just scented another marketable adventure, but I'm intentionally slapping that impulse away, because the book is lovely and deserves to be taken on its merits. And regardless of her initial purity of intention, the experience takes Christmas to some very heavy places. A session of lectio divina near the start of the process stirs up the memories of a rape she's spent decades of her life pretending never happened, so while discerning a possible vocation and grappling with her religious identity, she also ends up having to walk this painful path of trauma healing.

I also suspect that Christmas' obvious unsuitedness to cloistered life is exactly what makes the book work: she makes a good mediator between the kind of woman who is capable of becoming a nun, and the kind of woman (hi) who is not remotely capable of becoming a nun but could stand to profit from learning more about their ways. Christmas' fantasies of a life spent in an aesthetically pleasing state of leisurely communion with God are promptly supplanted by a hefty chore load, a jam-packed worship timetable, and the demand for a total renunciation of self-will. It’s not the big picture stuff she ends up chafing against. It’s the petty deprivations, like the dowdy habits (Christmas considers herself a fashionista) and the annoyance of not being allowed to finish her game when the hour of recreation ends. I get this. I think almost all of us probably get this, regardless of our vocation. I would give my life for my kids without a moment’s hesitation but will I give my morning coffee? Will I close my browser window, right this second, and go do something that benefits them instead? Because that’s what convent life is set up to train nuns to do. And watching an ordinary, self-willed woman fail at it is somehow very inspiring: I couldn’t do it either, not properly, but perhaps I could start doing a little bit more of it here and there! And perhaps that would be better than nothing!

At one point Christmas shared a remark from a priest, that taking confession from nuns is like being stoned to death with popcorn. I think that image will stick with me for a long time to come.

sovay

We might not have spent the sunset at Marblehead Light if we had known that all five yacht clubs within earshot would fire off a salute of cannons in accordance with the naval tradition of evening colors in season, but on either side of the sudden harbor-rolling cracks of smoke it was a postcard of a sunset in the smelted oranges and wave-mirrored blues of a painted present from, partitioned by the nineteenth-century cast-iron skeleton of the light itself.

spatch had wanted to take me to water after I had spent the previous day in the kind of pain where as soon as it eased off a little I passed out. We ate roast beef sandwiches parked at the Mystic Lakes and drove north once rush hour had died down.

( I've brought silver to set you free. )

Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard

rushthatspeaks' irresistible report on Tokuzō Tanaka's The Whale God (鯨神, 1962), a radiation of Melville I had known nothing about. Rob and I have not yet caught up on the latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026), but last week when we marathoned the previous three we were delighted to confirm that in its remix of New England horrors, Shirley Jackson had unambiguously entered the chat. Hestia, our own lighthouse, was golden-eyed in the cat tree.

Current Music: Goblin Band, "The Prickle Holly Bush"

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osprey_archer

June 2026

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Page Summary

lucymonster - Music post
asakiyume - Fundación Ángeles de 4 Patas
sovay - What can a friend do to try and convince you that trouble's the cost of being alive?
sholio - Sheer randomness
silverusagi - Reading
sartorias - By Lake Michigan
sovay - I'll spend past lives like they're dimes
raven - fic: slung on the lantern, a mast [m/m, Shetland]
sholio - Babylon 5 WIP is finally complete!
sovay - I think it's down between the earth and the pavement
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
sartorias - Rain! In June!
thisbluespirit - "I plan to live forever. Or die trying."
sovay - אַ ליבעלע װערט אַ ליבע, אַ לידעלע װערט אַ ליד
skygiants - (no subject)
sineala - Scrivener themes!
sholio - Dungeon Crawler Carl reread continues
chestnut_pod - I did it
lucymonster - Reading post
sovay - Did you bring gold? Did you bring silver to set me free?

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Page generated Jun. 9th, 2026 02:50 am

A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Reading

Music post

Fundación Ángeles de 4 Patas

What can a friend do to try and convince you that trouble's the cost of being alive?

Sheer randomness

Reading

By Lake Michigan

I'll spend past lives like they're dimes

fic: slung on the lantern, a mast [m/m, Shetland]

Babylon 5 WIP is finally complete!

I think it's down between the earth and the pavement

Recent reading

Rain! In June!

"I plan to live forever. Or die trying."

אַ ליבעלע װערט אַ ליבע, אַ לידעלע װערט אַ ליד

(no subject)

Scrivener themes!

Dungeon Crawler Carl reread continues

I did it

Reading post

Did you bring gold? Did you bring silver to set me free?

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June 2026

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