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Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

twistedchick

I am posting from the computer before my present one -- this one dates from the early 2000s, and is a bit slow. My good 2019 computer is in the shop getting a new keyboard -- apparently when one key is busted all of them are and the entire top of the laptop gets replaced. It's the down arrow that didn't work.

And because of that I have about 10 days either with only my phone (I will not describe going through 100+ new emails there; it is tedious) or this elderly one that I have purposely kept on an older operating system because this lappie has really excellent older software that simply doesn't work on the more recent op systems. So I am relaxing, watching old stored movies (Skyfall, anyone?) and doing offline sorting of books and papers and so on.

ETA: The guy at the shop said I could have them do the work in-house, for about 10 days, or they could send it to another shop where they would mail it back after about 5 days. I do not trust the current postmaster, or his cuts to service, or the possibility that it would end up sitting on a shelf somewhere and not come back, so I agreed to the 10 days or so.

I'm also feeling the losses, and letting myself feel them and letting them go through me instead of "braving it out" or trying to ignore them and having everything get worse later. I don't want worse later; now is enough. I can bear now. I am remembering so many little things, and big things, aond old things and it all just works.

It also means I'm sleeping a lot, around my meds schedule, which is less easy than it sounds. Basically, I have a BP pill and a blood thinner, each of which needs to be taken 2x a day about 12 hours apart, but not at the same time because the stress on my heart is too much. So I am carefully scheduling the one for 9 am and pm and the other for 10-11 am and pm, and that is working. Otherwise my heart bangs until it wakes me up, which is not fun.

I'm also handspinning silk roving in various colors; it's one of my favorite things to do while watching tv, because looking from the work in my hands to the set across the room keeps my eyes from getting stuck at the shorter distance. I did maybe 15 yards, three ply, today, which is 45 yards of single ply. You do the 3-ply by putting a big slipknot loop into the end of it, then continue to loop through the loop and twirl the spindle in the opposite direction of the single ply's twist. The result is useful, not so thin that it falls apart, and looks good. I am thinking of crocheting small keepsake bags from them.

That's about what's happening here, give or take a freeze warning or hearing the fox calling in the park half a block away late at night. I'm glad of that fox and its kin; they are welcome to come to my yard to eat mice whenever they wish.

petra

Covid: Speaking Out About Rubynye by

werpiper.

Current Mood: grieving
Current Music: Hey, everybody, got a favor to ask: shut the fuck up and put on your mask!

pauraque

We are going out of town for spring break! I expect to be back on Sunday. 🏖️

pauraque

This is the first part of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now, an anthology of speculative fiction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. I was glad to see that the introduction included the editor's thoughts about each piece (something that has been lacking in some of the anthologies we've read). The editor says that Aboriginal authors of SF have have historically had more success publishing their work as literary fiction than in SF outlets, suggesting a disconnect between white and Indigenous understandings of what "speculative" looks like. They point out, for example, that a time travel story may look very different through a cultural lens that doesn't see time as entirely linear in the first place.

The editor also says that they solicited several stories for the collection from writers who had never written SF before. Perhaps it is unfair that my reaction was to brace myself; I'll strive to be open minded. (It was also pointed out in the discussion that the Indigenous population of Australia is pretty small, so the pool of potential authors may not have been as deep as the editor might have wished.)

Some group members were not thrilled to learn that the book includes some excerpts from novels. We've run into this before and it tends to frustrate our purpose as a discussion group because we end up having the same conversation over and over, which is just "this didn't feel complete... because it isn't complete." The first three pieces we read are actual short stories, though!

"Muyum, a Transgression" by Evelyn Araluen (2017)

( A ghost travels the ruins of the world, finding that what seemed dead can come back. )

"Clatter Tongue" by K.A. Ren Wyld (2020)

[Note: The book lists this story under the author's former name Karen Wyld.]

( A grieving girl literally vomits the detritus of colonization when she is threatened. )

"Closing Time" by Samuel Wagan Watson (2020)

( In the early days of covid, a man wanders aimlessly. )

delphi

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

pauraque

In the decade between the original SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), Maxis released an interesting variety of life simulation games on different scales, many of which are now largely forgotten in the shadows of their two juggernaut cousins. Coming close on the heels of the macro-scale SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), lead designer Will Wright zoomed way down into the weeds to bring us SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991).

popup describes ant castes over a map of an underground nest

While you can learn a lot about real life systems from many of the early Maxis games, SimAnt leans more educational than most. You'll learn how ants forage, communicate, build and defend the nest, and produce new queens to found more colonies. Then you'll apply your knowledge to defeat and eliminate enemy ants, spread across the back yard, and invade the house until the homeowner gives up and moves away. It's a good time!

( More on SimAnt [content warning: talking spiders] )

You can play SimAnt in your browser, though the performance is sluggish. Running it in DOSBox is a little better.

delphi

Fandom 50 #10

When I was putting together this list of Canadian songs I love from the last fifty years, some years had a clear favourite jump out at me while others had too many bangers to choose between. (Seriously, 1993 turned out to be the keystone year whose ultimate selection affected everything from 1987 to 2001.) But 1986 was the first stumper.

I don't think it's the case that 1986 was a mid year for Canadian music. It's more likely that it's just the first year I was properly conscious of music, with the releases getting replayed throughout my early childhood until they became background noise. These are third-favourite albums from artists whose later eras hit stronger for me, songs I slept through during my first concert as a toddler, and snippets from radio bumpers that earworm me to this day.

So, without a stronger personal preference, the clear choice was the Canadian song of 1986. The one that everyone loved and then became so inescapable that everyone hated it, and which is probably on schedule for a revival soon if it gets used in the right commercial or CBC show. However you feel about it, it's hard to find something more Canadian than this.

Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell

Watch on YouTube

pauraque

While collecting the necessary materials for my Le Guin reading project, I found she had a story which appeared only in the 1973 anthology Clarion III. This was a product of the 1972 Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week course for aspiring speculative fiction writers, taught by a rotating slate of guest instructors. Le Guin was a Clarion instructor that year, and while most of the instructors contributed essays on writing or on the workshop itself, she instead wrote a story.

Since I'd bothered to acquire the book, I figured I'd read the whole thing. But I took my time about it since Le Guin's story didn't seem important to the general arc of her career, though obviously it's significant that her stature had grown to the point where she was invited to teach. So although my reading of her work has progressed in the meantime to 1979 (and will continue from there if the person who currently has The Language of the Night checked out ever returns it to the library!!) we're going to take a short trip back to 1973 here.

Le Guin's story "The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" is a fictionalized version of an exercise she gave the students, using them as the characters and reimagining the whole thing as a SF experiment. I guess in reality she built a mobile out of found objects (the titular construct) and told the class to write about it. I'm sure her story was amusing to the people who were there, but out of context I found it impenetrable. (And hold that thought, because I'm gonna circle back to it.)

As for the student stories, I liked a handful of them, but most were either not to my taste, or seemed underdeveloped in some way, or were so steeped in 1970s gender politics and/or sophomoric "dirty joke" humor that the generation gap was too wide for me to cross. To be fair, these are student stories, but none of them sent me running to look for the authors' later work.

( discussion of selected works )

( full list of included works )

petra

teland tagged me in a Tumblr meme, which I completed here for legibility/copy-paste-ability.

Here are my present thoughts about the first story I wrote in each of 30 fandoms, selected because those are the ones in which I have written more than 3 works longer than a drabble, with the occasional guest star of "All right, I mostly wrote drabbles in this fandom, but I really want to list it."

If that sounds like a meme you want to do, consider yourself tagged! The original meme was just "First story you wrote in each fandom" but I'd be here for a month if I did all of them.

The list of fandoms where stories appear is: Ashes to Ashes, Aubrey-Maturin - O'Brian, Battlestar Galactica (2003), Dark is Rising - Cooper, DCU (Comics), DCU Animated - Timmverse, Discworld - Pratchett, Doctrine of Labyrinths, due South, Falsettos - Finn & Lapine, Generation Kill (TV), Good Omens - Gaiman & Pratchett, Jeeves & Wooster, Les Misérables - Hugo, Life on Mars (UK), The Magicians (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, then known as Avengers (2012), Men's Ice Hockey RPF, Promethean Age - Bear, Singin' in the Rain (1952), Slings & Arrows:, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars RPF, Supreme Power, Tales of the City - Maupin, Twitch City, Vorkosigan Saga - Bujold, and White Collar.

( I am not monofannish )

Current Mood: proud of myself
Current Music: We have books, all kinds of fiction

petra

Feed the hungry? Heal the sick? Stop the war? Naaaaaah. Let's BUILD BIG ART.

Is it to celebrate Trump getting the FIFA Peace Prize? JD pwning the Pope?

Trump Admin triumphs: footage not found.

The mere concept of building a big monument to fuckall while we are actively ~~at war~~ illegally bombing another country without the consent of Congress, with no victory conditions and less motivation than the average divorce, offends me to the core. Triumphing over common sense is not a triumph.

Current Mood: ashamed
Current Music: My country, right or wrong; if wrong, to be set right.

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

After I finished The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, I idly looked for fanfiction. There are all of two fics: one is Una/Owen smut, and the other is not actually for The Everlasting but is a sort of fusion, Palamedes and Camilla from The Locked Tomb Series in a plot drawn from The Everlasting...

...and I really liked it! Camilla Everlasting by

DullestProdigalSon, about 23K, lots of very short chapters. You do have to have read Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, as it's very firmly based in those books, but I thought the translation of the Everlasting plot to the Locked Tomb world was very cleverly done. (You don't need to have read The Everlasting. There's some reference to "The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex" but you probably don't need to have read that.) In this story, Palamedes is the scholar/necromancer from the future who is sent back in time to help the famous Camilla Hect become a Lyctor. What's really cool is that in this fic, Palamedes was not the necromancer of the original narrative, but essentially overwrote that narrative to be the story we read in the novels, which I thought was very in keeping with the way that Harrow the Ninth rewrites the story of Gideon the Ninth, and also echoes Cytherea's actions in the first book. The character voices and general tone and style felt super-true to the Locked Tomb, too - overall an enjoyable read!

And...that's about all. I'm currently eyeball-reading The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, and listening to Heaven's River by Dennis E. Taylor (book 4 of the Bobiverse).

What I'm currently watching:

We noped out of Fallout S2 after two episodes, and are now about midway through 1923, one of Taylor Sheridan's numerous Yellowstone prequels. I had not been really inclined to watch it, but B roped me in with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, who I must admit are excellent here; however, the narrative strand dealing with the Indian boarding school is the most compelling (and horrifying) to me. (Living in Indian country now - Southern Ute land, near a college that is free for tribal members, who make up about half the student population, which incidentally was originally on the site of an Indian boarding school - I'm much more aware of this terrible part of our country's past.)

What I'm still playing:

I think I'm getting close to the climax of the second act (of three) of Ghost of Tsushima.

pauraque

As a kid I never played any of The Learning Company's dozens of Reader Rabbit games, so today we'll be correcting this surprising gap in my edutainment knowledge.

zorealis suggested the first game in the series, 1984's Reader Rabbit, aka Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. The alternate title sounds suspiciously Oompa-Loompaish to me, so fingers crossed that we will not meet with any gruesome poetic justice.

The game's menu offers nine options: Sorter, Labeler, Word Train, and six different Matchup Games. In Sorter you get a series of words, and you have to decide whether each one matches a given letter in either the first, second, or third position. If it matches, you move it over to the side, but if it doesn't you throw it in the garbage. (This obviously predates the 1990s eco-tainment craze, or else we'd be recycling.)

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

( More on Reader Rabbit )

Reader Rabbit was wildly popular and led to a slew of sequels and spinoffs. I had never heard of 1986's Writer Rabbit until

delphi brought it to my attention. Now, I'm not saying that playing this game will make you as good of a writer as

delphi is... but I'm not not saying that.

While Reader Rabbit offers a solid but fairly staid selection of spelling exercises, Writer Rabbit is far more wacky. After punching out from a week of back-breaking labor at the Word Factory, it's time to attend Writer Rabbit's Sentence Party and cut loose with a mix of games mashing up sentence diagramming and Mad Libs. In the Ice Cream Game, you are given a phrase and have to identify it as either WHO, WHAT, DID WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, or HOW.

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

( More on Writer Rabbit )

You can play Reader Rabbit and Writer Rabbit on the Internet Archive, for the finest in lapine-themed edutainment. Did anyone else play a game from this series? There are a million of them!

twistedchick

Three short takes -- comments on the decreasing Republicans in the House, the end of an alcoholic era, and people objecting to that inappropriate AI rendering of Trump.

delphi

Fandom 50 #9

For my 1985 pick, it feels like a good day for five minutes of surreal geography-themed art pop.

Map of the World, Pt. II by Jane Siberry

Watch on YouTube

pauraque

In the grim future year of 2021, safety is found only in certain walled communities, while lawlessness prevails in outlying areas. While driving through the California desert to visit family, a doctor and his twin teenaged daughters are captured by members of an isolated cultlike group whose founder was the sole survivor of a deep space mission to Proxima Centauri. The prisoners expect to be killed if they don't escape, but it might be even worse—the former astronaut and his followers carry an alien pathogen that gives them strange powers and bizarre compulsions, and they want to infect their three captives.

This was the last-published book in the Patternist series, but the third one I've read, as I'm following the suggested chronological reading order. I was warned that in this reading order it's totally opaque how this book relates to the others, which certainly is the case! The only apparent connection is Clay Dana, a minor character from Mind of My Mind who is said in this book to have invented interstellar travel using his psionic abilities. But the other characters don't seem to be aware of the telepathic Patternists as a group, so it seems that in the intervening decades they've managed to continue influencing society without fully revealing themselves.

Reading it basically as a stand-alone, the book seems to be about what it means to be human. It questions the dichotomy of human and monster, as the "ordinary" humans of the lawless desert prove more brutal and violent than the infected half-aliens are. The characters assume that allowing the pathogen to spread across Earth would be a bad thing, but when you see what human society is becoming, you wonder if altering more people's nature might be an improvement.

I felt that the book was too long, which is surprising at just over 200 pages. The characters are strongly written (as expected from Butler) but I think there might be too many of them, and sometimes the same events are needlessly reiterated from multiple POVs. I also had trouble with the level of violence. I didn't think it was gratuitous since it seemed necessary for the book to make its thematic points as I understood them; violence is just hard for me to read and there's a lot of it here, including rape and the constant threat of rape.

It'll be interesting to see how my perspective changes once I've read the whole series and seen what readers knew of the Patternist universe when these prequels were published. Worth noting that I will indeed be reading Survivor, a book in the series that's been out of print for ages because Butler apparently hated it. Very curious about that one.

petra

Primus Inter Sub-Pares: The Crisis in Leadership on Naboo in the Declining Days of the Galactic Republic (175 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sheev Palpatine, Padmé Amidala, Jar Jar Binks
Additional Tags: Abstract, in this essay I will, political science, History, article
Series: Part 4 of Star Wars Prequels in 2020s Media
Summary:

The abstract of a historical journal article.

Current Mood: retrospective
Current Music: It burned, burned, burned! And things were very historical!

twistedchick

I've come to a small turning in the road, metaphorically speaking. I've decided to quit newsblogging on Facebook, possibly permanently.

I am worn down by dealing with so much bad news all the time. When I worked long hours at newspapers, there was always something good in the mix, but now it's getting hard to find. And with the overflowing river of news these days, some days I work longer than I did at the papers, just to get through it and try to understand it all.

But there's more. In the last three months I have lost six people, some I've known for 30+ years, others all my life. A beloved older cousin, a talented and kind aunt, a teacher whom I will continue to learn from every time I open one of her books, two friends who always encouraged me (separately, in different ways) to be creative and innovative, and a third friend who challenged me to be as uniquely myself as she was uniquely herself. None of them were under 50, and all had rich full lives -- but the gaps they leave in the world are enormous, not just for me but for many others. And each death's loss and sadness get added to that which was here before, even if for some it was a relief at the end of long illness.

That's a lot. It would be a lot at any time, but it feels like more, now, because of all the horribleness going on -- ICE, the war with Iran, the Epstein entanglements and the many cruelties of this regime.

Also, nobody's paying me to newsblog. Not one no-longer-available cent. I've been doing it because it feeds my newsjunkieness, the reporter's need to know what's happening and tell others. It also ate my day, usually about six hours of it or more.

Enough.

I will still forward relevant articles (as long as I have arms and hands to type) but I'm not going to do the intense drop down into the zone any more, with multiple subject-categorized posts. I'd like to have a bit more life in my life than can be found behind a keyboard -- and have it be my own life, not one I'm looking at from the sidelines. I'll still write the Substack column, but leave it at that.

I will still be there, as I am here, just not as much every day.

And getting away from the keyboard serves my other life goal, which is to outlive the regime and the Occupant and his ilk (great non-swear-word for them) and have a good life doing it.

delphi

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

delphi

The first episode of the newest Dimension 20 campaign premiered on Wednesday, and I am so on board for this one.

City Council of Darkness is in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, the tabletop roleplaying game most commonly set in the modern day, where vampires belonging to various clans and bloodlines engage politically in their home cities while trying to manage their own bestial urges, avoid the vampire hunters of the Second Inquisition, and above all keep the existence of vampires secret from humanity at large. City Council of Darkness is about what happens when a group of ambitious San Francisco vampires' bid for attention from the vampiric elite goes comically wrong, resulting in them being banished to the town of Purpee, Oregon, and forbidden to leave until they establish vampiric dominion there.

So far, it's been supremely silly in the best of ways, well-paced and plotted, full of mayhem, with characters and relationships that I'm looking forward to learning more about and an important reminder that the real monsters of San Francisco are Silicon Valley billionaires. I especially can't wait to see more of the friendship between Ventrue finance hustlers LaVonte Worthy and H.J. Wingstreet (joining Kingston Brown & Pete Conlan and Montgomery LaMontgommery & Olethra MacLeod as characters played by Lou Wilson and Ally Beardsley whose dynamic immediately grabbed me) and whatever the deal is between chaotic '80s(?) Brujah childe Zaeth Bondana and his respectable sire Koschei Severov.

Watch on YouTube

The series as a whole is exclusive to Dropout.tv or through Youtube membership, but I'm pretty sure that in the tradition of Dimension 20, the first episode of the campaign will go up for free on the Youtube channel's Season Premieres playlist.

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lolaraincoat

August 2014

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Page Summary

mark in dw_maintenance - Search maintenance
twistedchick - As it has turned out...
petra - Ny | Rubynye | MinoanMiss | browngirl's cause of death - COVID-19
pauraque - out of office
pauraque - This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 1]
delphi - Six Sentence Sunday
pauraque - SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991)
delphi - Post and Jam: Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell [1986]
pauraque - Clarion III: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)
petra - My first fanfiction in many, many fandoms + thoughts
petra - US Politics: Biggest triumphal arch in world proposed commemorating MAGA
isis - wednesday reads and things
pauraque - Reader Rabbit (1984) · Writer Rabbit (1986)
twistedchick - (no subject)
delphi - Post and Jam: Map of the World, Pt. II by Jane Siberry [1985]
pauraque - Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler (1984)
petra - SW: Primus Inter Sub-Pares: The Crisis in Leadership on Naboo in the Declining Days of the Republic
twistedchick - (no subject)
delphi - Six Sentence Sunday
delphi - What's Making Me Happy Today: Dimension 20 City Council of Darkness

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Search maintenance

As it has turned out...

Ny | Rubynye | MinoanMiss | browngirl's cause of death - COVID-19

out of office

This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 1]

Six Sentence Sunday

SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991)

Post and Jam: Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell [1986]

Clarion III: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)

My first fanfiction in many, many fandoms + thoughts

US Politics: Biggest triumphal arch in world proposed commemorating MAGA

wednesday reads and things

Reader Rabbit (1984) · Writer Rabbit (1986)

(no subject)

Post and Jam: Map of the World, Pt. II by Jane Siberry [1985]

Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler (1984)

SW: Primus Inter Sub-Pares: The Crisis in Leadership on Naboo in the Declining Days of the Republic

(no subject)

Six Sentence Sunday

What's Making Me Happy Today: Dimension 20 City Council of Darkness

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August 2014

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