US Politics: Transcending parody

Jun. 12th, 2025 08:35 pm
petra: A cartoon penguin standing in dandelions thinking, "Dandelion break." (Bloom County - Dandelion Break)
[personal profile] petra
After illegally ordering the National Guard and the Marines to violently end protests in California, 47 went to the theatre to see Les Misérables.

Can we please fire the people scripting this season of the United States of America? Some of these choices are so asinine I think they're consulting genAI for their scripts, and no one is editing them.

Oh, wait, that's what the politicians are doing to make fucking laws.

I'm going to go read amnesia fic now and think, "I wish that were me."
petra: CGI Obi-Wan Kenobi with his face smudged with dirt, wearing beige, visible from the chest up. A Clone Trooper is visible over one shoulder. (Obi-Wan - Clones ftw)
[personal profile] petra
Make an ass out of u and me (1431 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Depa Billaba/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Shaak Ti/Quinlan Vos, Aayla Secura & Anakin Skywalker
Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Aayla Secura, Quinlan Vos, Shaak Ti, Depa Billaba
Additional Tags: A+ Jedi Pedagogy, Polyamory, POV Outsider
Summary:

Anakin has the most boringly perfect master in the entire Jedi Order. Some masters go on interesting missions; Obi-Wan does diplomatic missions where he sits at a table and says, "Hm, well…" a lot till he gets his way. Some masters have showy, dangerous lightsaber styles; Obi-Wan does Soresu, which is as purely defensive as anything anyone has ever devised. Some masters are fully-rounded people who drink and laugh and dance; Obi-Wan stays in with his three best friends and talks about philosophy all night, because he is a perfect Jedi, and so are they.

wednesday reads and things

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:16 pm
isis: (boromir)
[personal profile] isis
What I've recently finished reading:

Heartstone by C. J. Sansom, the fifth Shardlake book. Looking back at my reviews, I think the author must have got his feet under him better as he went on, or else he just shifted to things more to my taste, because I had said the fourth was my favorite so far, but I think I liked this one even better! This story is set mostly distant from court intrigue, though it comes in at the end; Matthew is given a legal case by Queen Catherine Parr, and it intertwines with his own interest in the situation that led to Ellen Fettiplace's commitment to Bedlam. I'm not going to mention my favorite thing about this book, because it is a spoiler, but - this book contains one of my favorite things. :-) Also I like the way the various plots and sub-plots wind around each other: the legal case, Ellen's history, Barak's relationship with his wife Tamasin (complicated by her pregnancy), Matthew's problematic new steward. Okay, I lied, this book contains two of my favorite things, and the other one is a fascinating and detailed endnote about the real historical events that this book is built around. I loved this in Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom books, and I love it here.

The Maid and the Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko, which is related to the Raybearer series, and which several people in my circle read and enjoyed, so I got it from the library despite my having been disappointed in the series. And as the other reviews said, it was rather heavy-handed issuefic (so was the Raybearer series), but also had clever worldbuilding, charming characters and, I thought, better pacing than the series. (Also was in past rather than present tense, which I prefer.) However, will someone please tell Ifueko that "monotone" is NOT A SPEECH VERB DAMN IT?!?!

What I'm watching now:

We've got three episodes left to go of Andor S2, and gosh isn't it ironic to be watching

Spoiler you can probably guess if you have seen the showa manufactured riot as pretext for government crackdown while a riot is being manufactured as pretext for government crackdown
I did read the interview with the showrunner about how no, he wasn't inspired by current events (that is, recent events, obviously the show was written well before current events!) but it's definitely inspired by historical fascist governments and fights against them, and wow, we are just proving that what goes around comes around, that human foibles are universal, etc etc, but still, holy shit, right? Yeah.

But as I have said before, this is the wonderful thing about SF, that it can recast real issues in ways that make them easier to understand than when you are right in the middle of them argh.
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
[personal profile] pauraque
I learned a few days ago that the Latin American Games Showcase is happening this week. This is very relevant to my interests, so I downloaded some demos. Too many demos, really, so I'm going to break my thoughts into two posts.

⭐ I want to play this.
❓ Maybe someday if it's on sale or if issues are fixed by release.
🚫 Not for me.

⚒️ Unreleased/early access.


⭐⚒️ Oscuro: Blossom's Glow (puzzle platformer - Hongoneon, Costa Rica )

⭐⚒️ PancitoMerge (Suika-like puzzle - Fáyer, Mexico )

I Did Not Buy This Ticket (surreal horror visual novel - Tiago Rech, Brazil )

Adore (creature-collecting ARPG - Cadabra Games, Brazil )

❓⚒️ Beacon of Neyda - Ghost Creative Studio, Uruguay )

🚫 The End is Nahual (variety puzzles - Third World Productions, Mexico )

🚫 Alexandria IV (sci-fi visual novel - J.M. Beraldo, Brazil )

🚫 Dreamcore ('liminal space' walking sim - Montraluz, Argentina )
pauraque: bird flying over the trans flag (trans pride)
[personal profile] pauraque
Note: Stronach came out as trans after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender her, as does the cover bio.

In this first book of a planned fantasy trilogy (of which two books have so far been released), we're introduced to the city of Hainak, a seaport that's just been through a political revolution, as well as an alchemical-biological magitech revolution. Our main character is Yat, a naive cop who wants to be a hero, but instead she's just been demoted for being queer. As her life crumbles into a haze of drugs and disillusionment, she stumbles into the doings of a secret faction, gets murdered, and finds herself resurrected with new powers that allow her to manipulate life force with her mind, all of which gives her a very different perspective on what a hero is and what she actually wants to fight for.

So... I really wanted to like this. I did enjoy the Māori-inspired worldbuilding and the author's vivid visual imagination, filling the city with a profusion of bizarre wonders as well as a strong sense of place. I also liked a lot of the characters and cared what happened to them. But ultimately I found the book didn't have enough structure to hold together.

It's being marketed as akin to Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, and I think that comparison pinpoints the problem. Many aspects of the book do seem similar—there's magic with body horror, fantasy with sci-fi, loads of queerness... as well as byzantine political intrigue, misdirections about characters' identities, conversations that don't specify what's being discussed, and long monologues from unidentified speakers. But the reason all the confusing stuff works when Muir does it is that she does eventually provide enough information for you to fit all the pieces together, and on re-reading you discover that all the things that initially confused you actually make complete sense and Muir had a plan all along. And maybe Stronach also has a plan in her head, but if so it didn't make it onto the page. The book ends in a muddle of events that seem superficially dramatic but don't actually explain that much or draw the needed connections between the disparate plot elements.

The part of the book that's presented the most clearly is Yat's journey of realizing that the police only protect the powerful and serve the status quo, so if she wants to be a hero to the downtrodden then being a cop isn't the way to do it. Which would be a perfectly reasonable character arc, except that Yat's backstory is that she was an orphan living on the streets and she saw firsthand on a daily basis what cops are like, so why is her story about her "realizing" something she already knows? I guess she's supposed to be in deep denial, but it just didn't make any sense to me.

Some reviews I read had also led me to believe that the book has a lot more pirate content than it actually does. I mean, it does have pirates! But I felt cheated that we didn't spend more time with them, both because pirates are awesome and because the backstory of these specific pirates was super intriguing but criminally underexplained. I often felt like the book was barely intersecting the outskirts of a way more interesting story centered on the pirate captain and her crew, and wondered why they weren't the main characters.

Anyway, I think there was a lot of potential here but it didn't cohere enough for me to want to continue with the series. Too bad.
delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
[personal profile] delphi
Fandom 50 #20

Untitled Ouizzy Neighbor AU by [tumblr.com profile] derekstilinski
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Frenchie/Izzy Hands
Medium: Gifset
Length: 3 gifs
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: romance, happy ending, getting together, constructed reality, au: modern, domesticity, nature

Description:
In the first gif, Izzy wanders out into a field and happens upon Frenchie, who's sitting alone and obviously having a bad time alone with his thoughts. In the second, the two men are each in their houses, looking out the window at each other's places. In the third, they've finally come together, Frenchie handing a wary Izzy a cup of tea.

I am such a sucker for constructed reality graphics and vids, and all the ways a little tactical harnessing of the Kuleshov effect can bring us the crossovers, AUs, and visual adaptations we crave. I've got a few from this same creator to rec, but I'm starting with this Neighbor AU that imagines a modern day Frenchie and Izzy living next door to each other in the country and catching each other's eye.

First off, I just love how it's put together, from the progression of running into each other by chance, then scoping out each other from their houses, to finally coming together for tea. But I also love how the choice of sources colours the story being told here. I'm pretty sure the Con O'Neill clips are from Vengeance Is Mine and the Joel Fry ones are from In the Earth. These are both harrowing movies where the actual characters are going through some awful things. I appreciate how those scenes get recontextualized here into something cozier that nonetheless paints a picture of both characters having gone through some rough times.

You can easily imagine that this modern Frenchie has just as many terrible things locked up in that little box in his head as his 18th century counterpart had, and that this Izzy has just been through an emotionally and/or physically traumatic breakup with Ed, and now here they are, a little bruised and cautious but finding some potential comfort and love in their own backyard.
jadelennox: its the story of an ice cube but every time he feels happy it make him melt a little bit more (story of an ice cube)
[personal profile] jadelennox

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I made a GF variant of Emma Goldman's blintz recipe this morning. (It's because for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I happened to have farmer cheese in the house.)

When I went looking for something snappy to turn my blintzes into a post, the first quotation on wikiquote is from a newspaper report after her arrest:

I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.

Anyway I am not an anarchist by any measure whatsoever, but I have generally found reading Emma Goldman to be informative and fulfilling (My Disillusionment in Russia is gutwrenching and honestly I think keyboard warriors should read it). Her wikiquote page is so chock full of evergreen statements that I can't even cherrypick anything else to quote. But how about this one?

The very proclaimers of "America first" have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism...the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed people in coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country.

You can make blintzes vegan, too, if you use banana instead of the egg and flip the blattlach very gently. That can be potato or blueberry blintzes, although I've seen a recipe for blintzes with cashew cheese.

In conclusion, blintzes! Mine had strawberries.

Neurodivergent reward cycle

Jun. 8th, 2025 07:33 pm
petra: A blonde woman with both hands over her face (Britta - Twohanded facepalm)
[personal profile] petra
My brain reward cycle is fucked, and the longer I think about it, the more I recognize that it's always been this way.

Case in point: I performed recently after preparing for 5 months.

My mother said, "It went well! That must feel good."

Me: "..."

It didn't. It never really does, not unless someone else gives me external validation.

Whenever I do something hard, my brain's response is, "Well, I did it, so how hard could it have been?"

This applies to excelling academically (which I have done frequently), excelling at my job (which I have done on occasion), every type of performance I've ever undertaken (and there have been a lot), every form of art/craft I've ever done (writing, knitting, crocheting, etc.), and helping friends.

Mostly I just feel relief that it's over, and my brain isn't going to give me the constant round of "You should work on [thing]!" anymore. Nah, the shoulds will switch to something else, but at least it'll be new at first.
isis: (squid etching)
[personal profile] isis
Paul Krugman talks with Ada Palmer about her new (nonfiction) book Inventing the Renaissance. I came at this from the Krugman side (he's a Nobel-winning economist who used to write for the NYT, and I subscribe to his substack) but I figured some of you would be interested from the Palmer side (I never got into Terra Ignota, though). I found it really interesting! I read the transcript, but there's a link to the video conversation as well.

Speaking of Nobelists, a v. v. srs study found that countries with greater per capita chocolate consumption produce more Nobel laureates - so eating chocolate makes you smarter, right? :-)
neotoma: My Glitch Avatar, with brown skin, purple hair, and cat ears (Glitch)
[personal profile] neotoma
Three quarts of strawberries, 3 pints of sweet cherries, a pint of sugar peas, locally grown brown rice, locally grown polenta, large soft pretzel, gruyere-bacon pastry wheel, lemon tart, fennel plant, dill plant, zinnia, cilantro, basil (all three plants given away by the local Master Gardeners group).

I guess I'm making strawberry jam this weekend.
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I deeply enjoyed reading a Star Trek: The Original Series story in which Hanahaki is nonfatal and limited to Vulcans. I enjoyed it all the more because I didn't read the tags beyond noting that it's General Audiences and No Warnings Apply. Having now read the tags and finished the story, which ends hopefully, I recommend that you give the story a try if the idea of Spock coughing up flowers of unrequited love appeals to you -- but page down and skip the tags, unless there are common pairings in the fandom that you need to avoid.

love is an affliction
petra: Luke Skywalker and Miss Piggy, who is dressed as Princess Leia (Luke Skywalker & Miss Piggy - Aw)
[personal profile] petra
Padmé, much like Dolly Parton, loses an Amidala look-alike contest. How many of the entrants are in drag? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

There are definitely drag king portrayals of Anakin and Obi-Wan in their heyday, possibly including makeouts with each other and/or drag king clones.

Anyone who has seen The Empire Strips Back knows what drag!Luke Skywalker is wearing, and as for Leia -- well, I could insert any number of pictures of people doing Leia drag, in any number of costumes, and she’s not even royalty in this galaxy. Who even knows how many hotass drag kings lust after Han’s gender, too.

Made in Korea by Jeremy Holt (2022)

Jun. 6th, 2025 12:47 pm
pauraque: bird flying over the trans flag (trans pride)
[personal profile] pauraque
Next up for Pride Month media, I read Made in Korea, a graphic novel about an android called Jesse who is purchased by a childless couple to be their daughter. Both the author Jeremy Holt and the illustrator George Schall are nonbinary (they/them).

parents gaze at an inactive android child in a box and marvel that she is beautiful

I had mixed feelings about this one. On the positive side, I really liked how the themes of identity and coming to know oneself were explored. Jesse's story is at least partly a metaphor for transnational adoption (Holt is an adoptee) and also resonates with more general feelings about not being the child your parents expected and needing to grow out of their narrative about you. Gender identity is directly addressed, which I love to see in an android story! It bugs me when androids uncritically accept a binary gender role based on the anatomy they're built with, even when the story digs into their personhood and free will in other ways. This book does not assume that an android built to look anatomically female is a girl, nor does it assume that if androids existed they would all be built with binary anatomy!

The major aspect that did not work for me was the plot element of a school shooting. (cut for content) )

So there was a lot that I liked, but also a pretty big section of the narrative that seemed totally out of place and mishandled. I don't regret reading the book and I think some aspects will stick with me in a good way, I just wish it had kept the focus on its strengths.
delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
[personal profile] delphi
Cloudward, Ho! is the newest Dimension 20 campaign of actual-play D&D with its classic cast of comedy improvisers. This one is an aeronautical adventure set in a steampunk universe, about a motley crew who set out on a quest in search of a lost continent and the expedition that disappeared before them. The first episode just came out yesterday, and I really enjoyed it!



Some Notes About the Premise (Moderate Spoilers) )
I'm looking forward to seeing where the campaign goes from here! Anyone else watching or planning to watch?
pauraque: drawing of a wolf reading a book with a coffee cup (customer service wolf)
[personal profile] pauraque
This is the fifth and final part of my book club notes on The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories. [Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]


"The Woman Carrying a Corpse" by Chi Hui (2019), tr. Judith Huang

Why doesn't she put it down? )


"The Mountain and the Secret of Their Names" by Wang Nuonuo (2019), tr. Rebecca F. Kuang

Wreckage from satellite launches threatens a rural village. )


"Net Novels and the 'She Era': How Internet Novels Opened the Door for Female Readers and Writers in China" by Xueting Christine Ni (2022) [essay]

What it says on the tin. )


"Writing and Translation: A Hundred Technical Tricks" by Rebecca F. Kuang (2022) [essay]

Kuang discusses translation. )


the end

I was pretty impressed by this collection. The stories spanned a lot of different themes and styles, and while not everything was to my taste, the quality of writing was high and it's hard to think of any entries that didn't at least offer something interesting to think about. There was agreement among the group that it's a good starting point for Chinese SF/F but of course it can only be a small slice of a huge and diverse field. I'd be interested to explore further.

I may need to sit out the next book for scheduling reasons. But even if so, I will return!

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