sovay: (Silver: against blue)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-06 11:45 pm

Comes a river running wild that will create an empire for you

From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as [personal profile] spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.
ladyherenya: (finding neverland)
Herenya ([personal profile] ladyherenya) wrote2025-07-07 10:32 am

Addendum about aesthetically-pleasing experiences

Having a break from work is wonderful. It’s made me reflect on what I can do to switch off and recharge.

Aside from my previously-mentioned resolution to prioritise reading books, I’ve been thinking about the time I spend outside and about stopping to focus on details, like birds and flowers. I’ve been thinking about the value of walking, and the spaces I could walk in.

So this article by Nada Saadaoui felt timely and interesting, For Jane Austen and her heroines, walking was more than a pastime – it was a form of resistance:
For Austen’s heroines, independence – however “abominable” – often begins on foot. Elizabeth may be the most iconic of Austen’s pedestrians, but she is far from alone. Across Austen’s novels, women are constantly in motion: walking through country lanes, walled gardens, shrubberies, city streets and seaside resorts.
These are not idle excursions. They are socially legible acts, shaped by class, decorum, and gender – yet often quietly resistant to them.
In an age where walking is once again praised for its physical and mental benefits, Austen’s fiction reminds us that these virtues are not new. Her characters have been walking for centuries – through mud, across class boundaries and against expectation.

Another recent article I found relevant was Slow looking is your ticket to deeper insights, better writing and quieter skies by Julia Baird:
This is why the re-emerging idea of "slow looking" in art galleries and museums is such a wonderful one; it encourages intense observation, attention to detail, reverence for art, skepticism about what first glances reveal, appreciation of learning, respect for the subject [...] I appreciate that some reading this might say: "Oh, it's very well for a bunch of academics to sit and stare at squirrels or fish for hours a day — most of us don't have time." But we don't hesitate to spend several hours on screens.
This is in an era where we are being constantly bombarded with news and information, some of it deeply disturbing, much of it skewed and false. Consuming anything slowly, paying deep careful attention, has become profoundly counter-cultural.
Anything that serves as an antidote to chronic distraction, that pulls our gaze from pulsing, popping screens to quieter skies surely should be applauded.
There is something a little bit ironic that I read this article on my “pulsing, popping” screen but the point remains.

And it reminded me that several times recently I’ve thought, Well, I could go to the art gallery in the city, it’s years since I last did that. It hasn’t been a very serious thought, more of an acknowledgement of the possibility than a plan I’ve intended to follow through.

I could go to the art gallery and the state library and the botanical gardens. I could.

Now, I think that I should.



Under the Tuscan Sun (2003): I watched this film again some weeks ago, even though I remembered being a bit disappointed by it, because I wanted pretty scenery.

My memory of the plot was so vague, most of the time it felt like I was watching the film for the first time, but I think it helped that I knew not to expect the film to be something it is not. It’s a romance, or not in the way I was hoping for when I was younger. (I don’t remember when precisely but I was in my late teens or early twenties.)

I appreciated Frances’ first-person narration. She’s a writer and I like the way she puts words together. There’s also something about the early 21st century fashion trends that I find satisfying. (I wonder if it’s because the late nineties / early noughties were when I started paying more attention to adults’ fashion choices, and consequently there’s a part of my brain that still thinks this is what people should look like.)

And there’s pretty Tuscan scenery, yes. Expand‘The trick to overcoming buyer's remorse is to have a plan. Pick one room and make it yours. Go slowly through the house. Be polite, introduce yourself, so it can introduce itself to you.’ )



Scrolling past things I wrote earlier in the year, my attention was caught by what I’d written about the British YouTuber Ruby Granger:
Ruby Granger’s mornings, with her casement windows and leisurely breakfasts reading and trips to feed the hens, reminded me of one of my all-time favourite of aesthetically-appealing things: the intro for The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.
And I’d titled my post with a lyric from the show’s theme song: On the wild and misty hillside.

All of this amuses me with its aptness, because Ruby Granger’s most recent video is actually about a trip to the Lakes District to visit Beatrix Potter’s house. She even made a couple of TikTok videos about it, using music from The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends!

ExpandI think this is what started me thinking about what I am a train journey away from, like the art gallery. )



ladyherenya: (doctor who)
Herenya ([personal profile] ladyherenya) wrote2025-07-06 07:29 pm

her imagination, frankly, deserved the benefit of the doubt

I decided yesterday’s post was getting long enough, so I didn’t include these reviews.

(One would think that after two decades of blogging – two decades as of April – I would be better able to anticipate my own verbosity. But apparently not!)



“The Dagger in the Desk” by Jonathan Stroud: I’d mentioned to my cousin that I was disappointed that Lockwood & Co. didn’t get a second season. She told me that all the books were available on Libby and that they dealt with threads that the adaptation had left hanging. I hadn’t been sure that the books would do that – for all I knew, for instance, that cliffhanger at the end of the adaptation had been a Netflix invention, not a Stroud invention.

I’d already read The Screaming Staircase (after I’d watched season one but before I discovered that there wouldn’t be a season two), so I picked up this short story next.

(Incidentally, The Screaming Staircase seems to be the last time I read a novel written by a man (excluding a couple of children’s books that I’ve reread because I was reading them aloud to my class). I hadn’t intentionally set out to avoid books by men or anything like that, it just happened…)

Lucy, Lockwood and George are called in to deal with a ghost in a school. The ensuing adventure is, well, short but I enjoyed it enough.
I stared at the dagger and wondered if I should risk it… Of course I should. I was an agent. Taking horrible risks was part of the job. We might as well have put it on our business cards.


The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud: This book follows events that were covered in the second half of the adaptation. Lucy, Lockwood and George are investigating the grave of a sinister Victorian doctor. A dangerous relic is stolen, and as they track it down, Lucy ends up spending more time talking to the ghost of a skull trapped in a jar.

It is two years since I watched Lockwood & Co., and at first as I read this, I couldn’t remember in very much detail what happened in the adaptation, nor determine how closely the adaptation followed this book. I just had the sense that everything turned out okay in the end, which somehow robbed the story of tension and meant it was easy to put down.

But as the book progressed, I found myself recalling the adaptation in more detail – and simultaneously feeling much more invested in what was happening on the page. Expand“Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,” George said. “Now that’s what I call a busy evening.” | Lockwood nodded. “To think some people just watch television.” )


The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud: Unlike the first two books, the events of this book didn’t feature in the TV adaptation, so I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. I enjoyed that!

There’s a mysteriously intense outbreak of ghosts in Chelsea and Lockwood is indignant that Lockwood & Co. hasn’t been asked to help deal with it. Even though they have enough work to keep them busy, so much so that Lockwood decides they need to expand their team.

Lucy is none too impressed by this development, and I found her experiences of having to work with a new colleague who, despite Lucy’s efforts to be polite and accommodating, keeps rubbing her up the wrong way to be relatable and a bit cathartic. (Which says as much about my own recent experiences as it does about this book but anyway.)

I would have promptly embarked on the next book but there’s a queue. I am apparently “2nd in line” and not feeling wholly patient about it.

(It occurs to me that “2nd in line” sounds like it should have a phrase like “for the throne after it.) Expand‘My name is Lucy Carlyle. I make my living destroying the risen spirits of the restless dead.’ )



The Forests of Silence by Emily Rodda: This was my chapter-a-week book. I’d read it before, in fact, I’d reread it before, but not, according to my reading record, since I was thirteen.

It is the first book in the Deltora Quest series and I enjoyed revisiting it. Some parts of it were more familiar than others. I’m now slowly rereading The Lake of Tears.



The Greatest Crime of the Year by Ally Carter: This is the sort of romantic suspense I want to read more of! Two crime authors team up to investigate the disappearance of a fellow mystery writer.

Maggie Chase is invited, along with her professional nemesis Ethan Wyatt, to spend Christmas at the English mansion belonging to Maggie’s favourite author, Eleanor Ashley. Some of Eleanor’s relatives are less enthusiastic about their addition to the party but, as everyone is snowed in together, there is little anyone can do about it.

So when Eleanor disappears from a seemingly-locked room, Maggie wonders… is this foul play? Or is it a test?

This was fun, but thoughtful, too. Expand‘She was being silly. She was being foolish. She was letting her imagination get the better of her, but her imagination had also paid the bills for the better part of a decade, so her imagination, frankly, deserved the benefit of the doubt.’ )
“They told her it was all in her head. She was imagining it. She was getting older, after all. Maybe she’d spent too many years looking for mysteries that weren’t there.”
And, suddenly, Maggie wasn’t talking about Eleanor anymore. “You know, if mankind has one universal superpower, it’s gaslighting women into thinking they’re the problem.” It was actually a great comfort, knowing that if it could happen to Eleanor, then maybe Maggie could forgive herself for not realising it was happening to her. “To the world, Eleanor was just an old woman who wasn’t quite as sharp as she used to be. But even if that were true” – Maggie didn’t even try not to grin – “half of Eleanor Ashley is still worth two of most people.”



Argylle (2024): This film opens with Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) in the midst of a mission that isn’t going to plan. There’s an utterly ridiculous chase scene and a dramatic discovery … and then the scene shifts to author Elly Conway, who is reading from her latest book. Because Argylle is fictional!

But when Elly, along with her cat, sets out to visit her parents, she encounters some real-life spies and she and her cat are soon on the run. With a spy who seems to be much more rough around the edges than Argylle is.

There’s another twist in the film and initially I wasn’t sure if it shifted the story from one I was really enjoying into one I didn’t like so much, but I decided I liked it! I liked how it fitted the pieces of the narrative, and how that narrative continued to be an action-spy-thriller with a woman’s experiences at its centre.

I also liked the soundtrack’s use of The Beatles’ “Now and Then”, which wasn’t released until 2023, so it sounds like an old song (because, well, it is) but it isn’t overly familiar or already associated with other stories.



The Intern (2015): I was surprised to discover that this stars Anne Hathaway (as the CEO of a fashion retail website, not as the titular intern, who is a former marketing executive bored by retirement, who is played by Robert De Niro).

I was also surprised that the film focuses on things I’ve become accustomed to seeing in Korean dramas but don’t necessarily expect from Hollywood, like intergenerational relationships, characters who are over 70, and the challenges faced by women juggling career pressures and personal lives. Or it could have been that the way the film explored those things was more like what I’d expect from a Korean drama. That was interesting.

Anyway, this film wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I liked it.
coffeeandink: (utena (fairytale ending))
Mely ([personal profile] coffeeandink) wrote2025-07-06 08:44 am
Entry tags:

Ghost Quartet (Green-Wood Cemetery, 7/28/25)

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.

regshoe: Redwing, a brown bird with a red wing patch, perched in a tree (Default)
regshoe ([personal profile] regshoe) wrote2025-07-06 02:20 pm

Rare Male Slash Exchange letter 2025

Thank you for writing me a fic in one of these lovely rare slash ships! I'm [archiveofourown.org profile] regshoe on AO3. I've said a bit below about what I like about my requested ships and given some prompts, but if you have a completely different idea you want to write, please go for it—I'll look forward to seeing whatever you come up with!

ExpandFandoms are Étoile (TV), Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped - McArthur & McCarthy & Stevenson and The Longest Journey - E. M. Forster )
ladyherenya: (reading)
Herenya ([personal profile] ladyherenya) wrote2025-07-05 05:39 pm

selections from the reading life

Today was sunny with a cold breeze, making the number on the thermometer deceptively optimistic.

(I paused here to look up why the standard spelling is thermometer and not thermometre, and I learnt: a metre is a unit of length and a meter is a device that measures and records the quantity, degree, or rate of something. Right. Obviously. This seems like something I should have realised before now. Hence perimeter, diameter, multimeter, etc.

Et cetera rhymes with meter in a non-rhotic accent. (I am interested in spelling patterns and how accents affect our perceptions of spelling rules, because this is relevant to my job.))

But today was still warm in the sunshine. I sat outside reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. (I haven’t read enough to feel hooked but I can see why my cousin recommended it. The prose is lovely.) When the sun moved behind the trees and my hands became cold, I took my dogs for a longer walk than usual because I wanted to see – and hear – the water birds. (I saw swamphens, mostly.)

I came home and made myself childhood comfort food (peanut butter on toast, and cheese toast) and a cup of tea. I’m sitting in the recliner chair that once belonged to my grandmother, and my great-grandmother before her. I watched as the setting sun lit up the nearby hills and now I’m watching as the last of the pink fades from the sky.

Bottle this feeling.



Part of the reason my current location seems like a better place to write than my desk does is likely because part of my desk is covered with books that I’ve bought this year but have yet to find shelf space for.

There’s also a book I took down from a top shelf (which I can’t reach without standing on a chair) to reread and I have neither reread it nor put it back. And I think there’s a colouring book…



The Season of Dragons by Tansy Rayner Roberts: This retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in a world in which patrons are actually dragons, and society is divided into hoarders, who care for dragons and their hoards, and dragon hunters.

The Iverwold family’s dragon has remained in hibernation for many seasons, leaving the family without her patronage and guidance. Dimity Ivorwold worries that this leaves her brother Chambrey vulnerable to making unwise decisions, like hiring a house in the country or falling in love with a pretty daughter from a hunter family.

I wasn’t certain how much I would like this – I have enjoyed other books by Roberts’ (like her Teacup Magic series) but Austen’s Caroline Bingley is not a character I particularly want to spend more time with. However, I liked Dimity, and I found I enjoyed not knowing how closely the story was going to follow the events of P&P – and not being entirely sure who was going to end up with whom!

The Season of Dragons was entertaining and it became all the more so as the story progressed and dragons played a bigger role in events. Expand‘I was going to miss it all. My foolish twin had got it into his head that being a Gentlemen of Significance with full access to his money meant THIS was the occasion to hire himself a country house in the middle of nowhere and ruin my life.’ )



A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid: By the time I noticed that this book was now available on Libby and I put it on hold, I could no longer remember why it had been on my list of books I was interested in reading.

I really enjoyed going into this story without knowing anything about it. It begins with Effy Sayre, a first-year student who is studying architecture because the literature college won’t accept women. She sees a notice soliciting designs for a manor home intended to house the library and the family of her favourite author, the late Emrys Myrddin. I liked wondering what sort of territory this was heading into… Fairytale territory? Arthurian mythology? Gothic Jane Eyre? Would it become a fantasy or would the fantasy be limited to the stories Effy loves?

I stayed up reading into the early hours of the morning, because I could not put this down. I loved how this is a story about stories. I loved the epigraphs taken from Myrddin’s work and from academic essays about it. (This reminded me a bit of Possession.) I loved the prose. I loved how the book evoked a strong sense of place, and built a compellingly-tense atmosphere. I empathised with Effy, with her love of books and her anxieties.

I didn’t have the sense to read this until two days before it was due back at the library, so I couldn’t immediately reread it like I wanted to. ExpandBut I bought a copy this week and it’s now one of the books sitting on my desk. ) One of the reasons I’ve kept thinking about this story is because the weekend I read it, I discovered Taylor Swift’s “Lavender Haze - Acoustic Version”. I don’t think I actually listened to the song while I was reading A Study in Drowning but I did listen to the song many times that weekend, and my memory linked the two together.

Whenever I’ve listened to the song since then – apparently it’s my most-listened to track of the past 90 days – it has evoked memories of this book. It is possible I have listened to the song all the more because it has evoked memories of this book.



Lady of Weeds by W.R. Gingell: This is another book I went into knowing almost nothing about it, and I really enjoyed that reading experience. All I knew was that it was connected to Lady of Dreams but set in a different country. (If I had read Lady of Dreams more recently, I might have realised the connections between the two stories faster, but I don’t think it mattered that I didn’t.)

As a guardian it is Carys’ job to protect the village by clearing seaweed from the shoreline every morning, to prevent it falling into the hands of dangerous selkies, and she is entitled to take anything she finds washed ashore. One morning, she finds an unconscious, injured young man in a rock pool.

I liked the descriptions of Carys’ life by the sea. I liked the mysteries, of which there are several tangled together – Who is Eurion and what happened to him? Why does Carys care about the ring she found with him? And what is Carys’ history? – and how they unfolded. I liked how Eurion, so sunny and effervescent, is such a contrast to Carys. And I liked how Carys’ words and thoughts can make her seem cold but, over time, her actions reveal a softer, warmer side. Expand‘Carys was used to the dark and the cold, just as she was used to the loneliness. She’d become so used to them, in fact, that now she merely thought of them as everyday life and no longer thought of them by their names.’ )



The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn: I impulsively bought this back in February because it was on sale and and it sounded like it might be interesting. And I’d liked two of Vaughn’s historical novellas. By the time I opened up The Naturalist Society, I couldn’t remember any specific details about it.

It is a fantasy set in the 1880s, mostly in New York, in a world in which knowledge about the natural world is valued, because those who practise Arcane Taxonomy can use this knowledge to do what could – and, in another book, would – be called magic.

As women are not allowed to join the Naturalist Society, Beth Stanley has been publishing her essays under her husband’s name, but Harry’s death cuts her off from this outlet for her work. When two of Harry’s friends, the explorer couple Bran West and Anton Torrance, visit Beth, hoping to find something in Harry’s study that could help with their next expedition, they discover Beth’s secret.
ExpandThis is a story about Arcane Taxonomy and ornithology and polar explorers, but I thought it was most compelling as a story about grief. )



Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989): This isn’t a book but I feel like I should write about it here anyway, for thematic reasons.

People have recommended this film to me, but I didn’t get around to watching it until a couple of weeks ago. For the third week in a row, it felt like work had dominated my weekend (I’d decided that this was the best way for me to meet deadlines), and I just wanted to curl up on the couch with my dogs and watch something soothing and aesthetically pleasing.

I didn’t know what Kiki’s Delivery Service was actually about, beyond the clues given by the title, but I suspected it would fit the bill. And it did!

I wonder if I would have liked it even more if Kiki had been at least a year or two older – a thirteen year old leaving home to live alone is, if one thinks about it, quite an unsettling prospect – but then again, maybe that is actually part of what makes the film soothing? Because Kiki is young and vulnerable, but she’s able to find her place in the world without anything too terrible happening to her. Maybe that’s as much the fantasy as her broomstick and her telepathic connection to her cat.

I know, I should prioritise watching more Studio Ghibli films. (I have now seen *counts* five.)
ladyherenya: (icon)
Herenya ([personal profile] ladyherenya) wrote2025-07-02 03:11 pm

Observations from the life of a reader, not reading so much

I have spent most of the day sitting in the lounge room so I could watch the rain. It is most convenient of the weather to finally rain properly on a day when I was not planning on going anywhere.

I won’t know how much rain we’ve had until someone ventures out to check our rain gauge. I’ve looked up the two closest weather stations; one seems to have recorded too little to match the constant downpour I’ve observed but I don’t want to get my hopes up that we’ve instead had as much as the other station. Usually we don’t.

Things I worry about in the winter of 2025 – whether we’re getting enough rain.



I am currently on track to read the fewest books that I’ve ever read in a year.

At first I did not let this bother me.

There are a lot of good reasons for not caring about the number of books one reads in a year, at least not – or especially not? – when one is still reading considerably more than the “average person reads one book per month” statistic. One’s self-worth, and even one’s identity as a reader, are not tied to the number of books one reads. The quality of one’s reading experiences is more important than the quantity.

And the quality of one’s non-reading experiences is more important than the quantity of books one reads.

The April holidays, for instance. Those holidays in 2023 were memorable because I read nearly a book a day: 13 novels and 3 novellas, plus I had an audiobook I was in the middle of; possibly I reread some books as well.
Last year that fortnight was probably more typical: 6 novels, plus I finished one audiobook and nearly finished another, and I know I reread at least 3 books.

In contrast, this year I read – wait for it – 2 novels. I also finished an audiobook and started another.

But I have some good memories from the holidays:
• One of my cousins came to stay. She and I went on some lovely walks, and hunted around secondhand shops and wandered through bookshops, and swapped recommendations.
• I spent more time with my grandmother and discovered that one of her weekday carers is someone I knew in high school (we weren’t in the same year level but we went on the same overseas trip!).
• I watched two or three things I’d been meaning to see.
• I went to a handful of sessions at an Easter convention, because one of the guest speakers was so interesting and encouraging, and on two different occasions, I ran into a former colleague – one I’d worked with closely and the other I’d only ever spoken to in passing, but I had a good chat to both of them.

So when I went back to work, I didn’t feel any need to regret the amount of time I had, or hadn’t, spent reading.

But that was just two weeks out of 26.

Work has taken up more of my time. I’ve spent more time working (nearly 60 hours more than the first half of last year), and more time talking about, and thinking about, work, which is far harder to quantify.

ExpandI suspect that the chief reason I’ve been reading less is because of work. )

In the last few weeks, that smaller-than-average number of books that I’ve read this year has begun to really bother me.

I don’t know if what I want is the sense of accomplishment that adding books to my reading record gives me. Or is what I’m missing is the emotional experience of reading – the enjoyment of a good story, and the distraction from thinking too much about my problems.

All of the above, probably.



I am going to try to prioritise reading more.



I have been finishing setting up my new phone. Most parts of the process have been easier than I was expecting, and other parts have proved to be more complicated. (My previous phones all had SD card slots so I’ve always stored files on an SD card, leaving me naively and blissfully ignorant of how files transferred directly to the phone have their date modified metadata overwritten with the date they were copied. This is not behaviour I am happy about. (Also, what do you mean, my calendar app will only sync events from the past year???))

It’s been a while since I last went through this process, not since right before the pandemic began – which certainly feels like an age ago. In more ways than one.

But I have also just opened a soon-due-back-so-I-better-read-it library book – one my cousin recommended – and been startled to notice that its publication date – 2020. I knew this book had been around for a couple of years but my impression was that it wasn’t that old!

I have realised that I could keep my old phone beside my bed to use for books and music. In this location, its reduced battery life wouldn’t matter. I could turn off work notifications, maybe even log out of some things altogether. I could take off its bulky case, which has been very convenient when out-and-about but less so when reading in bed.

And overnight my new phone could live… elsewhere!

ExpandI have been unwilling to embrace the oft-repeated advice of not keeping one’s phone beside one’s bed. )

Honestly, I’m not sure what delights me more. Having a shiny new phone, or having a new purpose for my old phone.
littlerhymes: (Default)
littlerhymes ([personal profile] littlerhymes) wrote2025-07-06 04:21 pm

June reading

Last Night in Montreal - Emily St John Mandel
Midwinter Nightingale- Joan Aiken
The Witch of Clatteringshaws - Joan Aiken
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem - Nam Le
Red Sword - Bora Chung, transl. Anton Hur
A Magical Girl Retires - Park Seolyeon, transl. Anton Hur
The Spear Cuts Through Water - Simon Jimenez
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures 2, 3 and 4 - CRC Payne, Starbite
Batman: Nightwalker - Marie Lu
Nightwing 1: Leaping into the Light - Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo

Expandbooks and comics )
lucymonster: (books)
lucymonster ([personal profile] lucymonster) wrote2025-07-06 12:51 pm

A very eclectic reading post

These three books have absolutely nothing to do with each other except that I read them all recently and want to share. Brace yourself for whiplash, maybe?

Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson is a dark f/f novella. Fresh from a bad breakup, lit professor Ro meets a beautiful woman named Ash at a farmer’s market. Ash’s life is a cottagecore fantasy: old-fashioned, frugal, everything handmade and homegrown and Instagram-perfect despite the fact that she doesn’t own a phone. Ro falls head over heels at first sight. But Ash is also strange and prickly, with strict boundaries and a fierce need for privacy, and things take a bad turn when Ro violates both.

This was a gripping story full of lush descriptions of delicious food and wholesome country life, compelling characterisation, and a command of pacing that made it feel like a delightful, idyllic country romp until I realised that a sense of oppressive horror had crept up without my noticing. It was also, in the end, much too dark for my personal taste. More hardened horror aficionados may enjoy it as is - [personal profile] fiachairecht, [personal profile] snickfic, I thought of you guys - but I was hoping for a particular kind or reprieve that didn’t come, and the last couple of chapters ended up veering into deep squick territory for me. Still, if I could tear them out and rewrite my own ending then I think it would be one of my favourite things I’ve read this year so far.

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid is a biography of Maria Mandl, head overseer of the Auschwitz women’s camp. Eischeid is a musician and academic specialising in the music of the Holocaust, who first took an interest in Mandl because of her founding of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra; but Mandl’s life and career are overall poorly documented, so it took twenty years to research and write this book, drawing from an amazing breadth of sources to flesh out a story many historians would have deemed untellable.

It is, as I’m sure no one needs telling, an absolutely brutal read. There are some ways in which Mandl strikes me as a better example of the underlying spirit of fascism than your Hitlers or Himmlers or Mengeles: she was an ordinary woman from an unimportant village with no particular interest in politics, who joined the camp system because it was a well paid job in a difficult economy. Experiencing power for the first time in her life, she quickly took a shine to it and embraced the state-sanctioned opportunity to take out all her own petty grievances on her prisoners in ever more gruesome ways. She had moments of kindness and (rather more) moments of truly diabolical creativity as a torturer, but by far the majority of her day-to-day conduct seems to have been driven by her own pedestrian desire to feel important and to live comfortably, enabled by lazy acceptance of the dehumanising rhetoric in circulation among her colleagues. The results were horrific and an awful testimony to just how easily small, "normal" people can become genocidal monsters.

I will note that the structure of the book is slightly strange: it's split into tiny, mostly two- or three-page chapters, presented in a way that I'd probably call "snackable" if it were about literally anything besides the fucking Holocaust. I'd have preferred a less disjointed narrative, especially given the gravity of its subject matter - but I don't think I can hold that too much against the book, because it is in every other respect a truly excellent piece of Holocaust research and one that is unfortunately, heartbreakingly relevant to our current moment.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict ed. Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates is just SO MUCH FUN, if your idea of fun includes taking dumb sci-fi worldbuilding far more seriously than it was ever designed for. It's a delightful and educational essay collection that uses examples from Star Wars to explore different aspects of modern US military strategy. The contributors are a mix of military personnel and sci-fi writers, and its subject matter ranges from sweeping doctrinal overviews to thinly veiled analyses of specific real-world conflicts (in one essay, Endor is Afghanistan and the Ewoks are an exploited local people to whom interplanetary jihad sounds increasingly appealing). This is a library find that I feel like I need to invest in my own copy of, because it's going to be useful not just for Star Wars fanfic but for any other writing I might ever do that involves military conflict.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-05 08:29 pm

I'm a mercenary soldier and we all look the same

I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week [personal profile] spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.
regshoe: Black and white illustration of a man, Alan, in 18th-century dress, jubilantly raising his arms for a hug (Come to my arms!)
regshoe ([personal profile] regshoe) wrote2025-07-05 04:45 pm

Hurt/Comfort Exchange reveals

[community profile] hurtcomfortex works are revealed, and I have received this lovely cosy Alan/Davie in Balquhidder fic. I recommend it :D
sholio: (Cute cactus)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2025-07-04 11:31 pm

Hurt/Comfort Exchange

[community profile] hurtcomfortex released today! I happened to be driving a backcountry highway with no cell service at the time (coming home from Mom Things), but it was lovely to find my gifts waiting for me when I got back.

Hold a Candle To (MASH, 3400 wds, gen) delivered some lovely Charles drug withdrawal h/c with teamy affection, and A Way Out (Biggles, 4400 wds, gen) let me roll around in excellent Biggles & von Stalhein enemies-era reluctant cooperation and sympathy. Truly a lovely haul!
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-04 11:32 pm

All of my ghosts are my home

On the normality front, our street is full of cracks and bangs and whooshes from fireworks set off around the neighborhood, none so far combustibly. Otherwise I spent this Fourth of July with my husbands and my parents and eleven leaves of milkweed on which the monarch seen fluttering around the yard this afternoon had left her progeny. My hair still smells like grill smoke. Due to the size of one of the hamburgers, I folded it over into a double-decker with cheese and avocado and chipotle mayo and regret nothing about the hipster Dagwood sandwich. A quantity of peach pie and strawberries and cream were highlights of the dessert after a walk into the Great Meadows where the black water had risen under the boardwalk and the water lilies were growing in profusion from the last, droughtier time we had passed that way. I do not know the species of bird that has built a nest in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen, but the three eggs in it are dye-blue.

On the non-normality front, I meant it about the spite: watching my country stripped for parts for the cruelty of it, half remixed atrocities, half sprint into dystopia, however complicated the American definition has always been, right now it still means my family of queers and rootless cosmopolitans and as most of the holidays we observe assert, we are still here. It's peculiar. I was not raised to think of my nationality as an important part of myself so much as an accident of history, much like the chain of immigrations and migrations that led to my birth in Boston. I was raised to carry home with me, not locate it in geography. I've been asked my whole life where I really come from. This administration in both its nameless rounds has managed to make me territorial about my country beyond the mechanisms of its democracy whose guardrails turned out to be such movable goalposts. It enrages me to be expected not to care that I have seen the pendulum swing like a wrecking ball in my lifetime, as if the trajectory were so inevitable that it absolves the avarice to do harm or the cowardice to prevent it. It is nothing to do with statues. The door to the stranger is supposed to be open.

The wet meadows of the Great Meadows are peatlands. They were cut for fuel in the nineteenth century, the surrealism of fossil fuels: twelve thousand years after the glaciers, ashes in a night. The color of their smoke filled the air sixteen years ago when some of the dryer acres burned. If you ask me, there's room for bog bodies.

asakiyume: (glowing grass)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-07-04 03:42 pm

July 25, 2000

My mood improved markedly with a visit from the tall one and his son, my grandkid, little treelet.

Wakanomori brought down a diary the tall one had kept as a kid: here is the entry from July 25, 2000, which includes our visit to Lloyd Alexander's house, where we put on a play for him and his wife Janine. Also included is a visit to the US mint in Philadelphia and commentary on the Delaware River (big!)

asakiyume: (black crow on a red ground)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-07-04 11:35 am

a handful of microfictions

Having some feelings, so ... have some microfictions.

May 20, prompt word "serve"

Directions for serving certain abstract dishes:

--revenge is a dish best served cold
--pornography is a dish best served hot
--satire is a dish best served salty
--mockery is a dish best served bitter
--disappointment is a dish best served sour
--romance is a dish best served sweet


June 26, prompt word "kind"

"May I pay you in kind rather than currency?" the woman asked. The man was selling Dastrian funerary masks, perhaps war loot from the last conflict.

"That depends. What you got to offer?" He was suspicious--she looked Dastrian.

"These magical birds."

Impressed, the man agreed.

As he neared home that evening, the birds suddenly took flight. They plunged through the windows of his house, seizing precious objects in their talons, and flew off.

Payment in kind.

July 2, prompt word "clear"

"I'm not guilty," I insisted. It was true. Sure, I'd taken the bribe and misplaced evidence, but I did NOT betray Pereira. Yet now all I got were angry looks and curses.

"My spell will clear your name," Lady One Eye said. I believed her and didn't notice when she added, "Clear it but good."

The next day, no one knew me. I introduced myself and they looked confused. I wrote out my name, but it was like they couldn't see it.

My name had been cleared into invisibility.
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2025-07-03 09:09 pm
Entry tags:

Murderbot 1x09

This show is such a freakin' delight.

ExpandSpoilers )
sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-03 11:56 pm

Through crime and crusade, our labor it's been stolen

Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography and worried me.

Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.

I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.
landofnowhere: (Default)
Alison ([personal profile] landofnowhere) wrote2025-07-03 05:47 pm

thursday books travel through time

Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. Reread of a book I read many times in my teens and early twenties, but this was my first time reading it in quite a while. It is still a very good book, though I don't love it as unreservedly as I did when I was a teenager. (Also it is the source of my username :-)) Things I noticed in this readthrough: I find Tom's "heroic driving" far more alarming now that I actually know how to drive a car. I'm also thinking about how things look from Seb's point of view, which I didn't before because he comes across as such an unlikeable character. I was wondering if the detail that he's a fan of Michael Moorcock is supposed to suggest that he's a Moorcock protagonist seen from the most unflattering viewpoint, but as, thanks to this book, I have never had any desired to read Moorcock, I can't say. (That said, Seb actually has decent taste in rock music! I find the Doors' Riders on the Storm to be evocative of the same themes as Fire and Hemlock, and wonder if it was an influence.)

The Fair-Haired Eckbert, Puss in Boots, The Midsummer Night by Ludwig Tieck, in English translation by various translators, available on Wikisource. I've for a while entertained the extremely aspirational idea of writing historical fantasy about the Mendelssohn siblings, and as part of that project I've been reading fantasy/fairy tales by German Romantic authors whose poems Fanny and Felix put to music. (A previous installment of this was Eichendorff's The Marble Statue, which I never wrote up.) The Fair-Haired Eckbert is one of these, and generally worked for me as a weird fairy tale, despite over-the-top plot twists and being the sort of tragedy where the characters alwasy make the worst possible decisions. But the main thing I got from it was from looking at the song part in German, and learning the excellent word Waldeinsamkeit.

Puss in Boots was recommended by a friend on Discord, after I mentioned reading Tieck: it is a comedy-satirical meta-theatrical adaptation of the fairy tale, published in 1797 but not staged until 1844 (I can see why -- it seems like a hard play to stage! but I think it will be fun to do as a group readaloud.) Tieck is just much more enjoyable when he's not taking himself too seriously.

The Midsummer Night, or Shakespeare and the Fairies is 16-year-old Tieck's Midsummer Night's Dream fanfiction, which he was prevailed to publish late in life, and is pretty good for that. (I wish I knew more about the Mary C. Rumsey who translated it.)

Homer's Daughter, Robert Graves. [personal profile] cahn's Odyssey read reminded me of this book, which I enjoyed when I was younger; and while I should in fact reread the Odyssey, I was visiting my family and looking for a paper book to pick up, so I started this; the premise is that our protagonist is a young Sicilian princess who is going to go on to write the Odyssey, basing certain parts on her own life. I'm liking it as much as I remembered it (especially once I got past the info-dumpy prologue), and enjoying how many details of women's work it weaves in to the events of the story. (I know now that Graves shouldn't be taken seriously as a scholar of ancient mythology, but it still makes for interesting worldbuilding and story.)
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-02 04:55 pm

You think one plus seven seven seven makes two

I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to [personal profile] rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.

"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.

Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
rachelmanija ([personal profile] rachelmanija) wrote2025-07-02 01:39 pm

The Way Up is Death, by Dan Hanks



In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.

I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:

Time to give her the Alpha Male rizzzzzzz, baby!

The ending was, unsurprisingly, also a cliche.

ExpandRead more... )