sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
All praise to the makers of Bar Keepers Friend, which enabled me and [personal profile] rushthatspeaks to de-blue the shower tonight after he had re-dyed his hair. It took us four tries to find a restaurant that wasn't dark Mondays, but eventually El Vaquero came through with, in my case, a spectacularly stuffed burrito de lengua which did its best to be bigger than my head. I am not at the top of my health and feeling more than a little disintegrated about current events. Have a picture from a window of MIT.

Fourth Street Schedule

Jun. 2nd, 2025 07:09 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Fear, Loathing, and Transcendence in the Great American Road Trip. Friday, June 13, 4:00. Beth Cato, Marissa Lingen, Alec Marsh, Arkady Martine, Reuben Poling. Whether we like it or not, we are currently in the United States of America. The particular fantastic resonance of this country, and the continent it occupies, is often evoked by that great American literary tradition – the road novel. There’s an undeniable magic to traversing this huge landmass, with all its relatively open spaces. The brutal process of colonization that produced this country, and the unusually truncated history delineated by that process, add texture and horror to the magic of the open road.

Books like Max Gladstone’s Last Exit or Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning take the American road novel a step or ten further into the fantastic, including unflinching consideration of the bones beneath the highway. What other possibilities can fantasists encounter out on the interstate, and what can they throw in the trunk to bring along into other worlds than these?

I'm Only Happy When It Rains. Saturday, June 14, 2:00. Elizabeth Bear, Anthony W. Eichenlaub, Marissa Lingen, Arkady Martine, Caroline Stevermer. The weather’s weirder lately. Or at least out here in the regular world it is – but the weather’s been weird in fantasy for a long time now. Sometimes it tries to kill you (like in McCaffery’s Pern novels or Elizabeth Bear’s The Steles of the Sky), sometimes it makes you really miserable and then it tries to kill you (CJ Cherryh’s 40,000 in Gehenna, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather), and sometimes you try to kill it and that doesn’t go so well (every story about terraforming or cloud seeding or propitiating the weather gods for mercy). Is the weather really just an excuse for an author’s indulgence in pathetic fallacy? Or can the environment become a live actor in fantasy storytelling?

Books read, late May

Jun. 2nd, 2025 06:55 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Yukito Ayatsuji, The Labyrinth House Murders. The first of two books I read this fortnight whose ending made me actively quite angry. The ending did not work for me at all, leaning hard on two twists one of which frankly did not work for me logistically. Yuck.

Peter Beinert, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a great example of a time when it's good to be aware that I am not the target audience for everything, because I think Beinert's main target audience is the overlap of his fellow Jewish people (I am not) and people who need convincing that being concerned for Jewish safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) and being concerned for Palestinian safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) do not have to be opposing concerns (I already believe that). It was still interesting to see how he approached this topic writing to people who are not me, and it's a very short book, but it's not any more cheerful than you might think, especially as he is willing to discuss recent deaths in this region from both/several groups in some detail.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Complete Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. It is what it says on the tin: all her stories, arranged chronologically. They are the sort of slice of life vignettes (and somewhat longer sometimes) that I don't often like, and I liked these enough to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of them. Why? I'm not sure. I think because the slicing of life was done with a firm, wry hand? I think most people would enjoy this more in small bites, and maybe I would too, but I was traveling and had limited book supply, so this is where we landed.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 25-26. Kindle. This is the end of this book, and it has an ending entirely in keeping with its genre, so it likely won't surprise you if you parcel out the reading like this, but it will satisfy inasmuch as the boarding school story can satisfy you. If you're not a boarding school story fan, this is definitely not the story for you.

Adrienne Maree Brown, Ancestors. I can verify that it's okay to read this without the two that precede it in its series because that's just what I did. You'll get all the incluing you need about what has happened (a plague, Detroit being enclosed behind a wall) and who these people are (a diverse bunch of people with intermittent super-ish powers), and their personal problems entwine satisfyingly with their science fiction problems. Also there is a bunch of sex and gender, in case you want some. Also, and importantly, there is a quite good dog.

Willa Hammitt Brown, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack. This is lavishly illustrated though a bit repetitive--it's definitely for the general/casual audience. (We live in a time when a book interrogating the masculinity of lumberjacks can be for the general/casual audience. What a world.) I learned some things that apply to my own ancestors as well as more general things about the lumber camps and their later mythologization, so that was interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, How to Write Romantasy. Kindle. This only gets categorized as "books" because it was an individual ebook. What it is actually is an essay, and I picked it up because I am not fond of romantasy as a category but am fond of Steph's work and the work of a few others I know she also enjoys, and I thought I would learn more from someone doing it in a way I like and respect than from people whose work doesn't connect with me. This did turn out to be the case--there were thoughts about subgenre and relationship arc that are useful to me even as I write things that are definitely not romantasy.

A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. Reread. This is the wrong end of the series, this is starting at the ending, but I still find these characters fascinating, and this is the one I could--with some joy--find used, that I was missing. (I still need a copy of the first one but I can reread the middle two any time I like.) Midcentury women struggling to lead meaningful lives, love to see it.

Antonio Carbone, Epidemic Cities. Kindle. A quite short monograph on the various handling of different plagues by different cities, probably will not be much new if you think about this topic a lot but a good intro.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Kindle. I said sarcastically to my niblings, "You'll never guess how it ends." But there's a lot that comes for the archbishop before death, wandering around the American Southwest in an era that...look, Cather doesn't have what we'd call modern consciousness of colonialism, but she has better awareness of Native people as people than I would have feared for this era.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Kindle, reread. Reread this for my book club, glad to discuss the stories in more detail with other interested people.

C.S.E. Cooney, Saint Death's Herald. Second in its series, and just as lovely in its writing and characterization and combination of whimsy and seriousness, no one else is quite like Cooney in that combination. Very happy to have this, you might be too.

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This contains comparisons of art/archaeology to literary portrayal in this era, which is interesting, but also you will know just from the title whether you are the audience for this book or not. It is an absolutely lovely thing that it is, but it's not some other secret thing that will surprise you. I got it off a shelf labeled "history of WHAT???," and you will know whether that shelf is your heart's home or not.

Francis Dupuis-Derland and Benjamin Pillet, eds., Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom. A series of interviews with people who have very different relationships with this term--gave me a lot more questions than answers, which is I think a good sign in this kind of book, especially when the people being interviewed have more writings available elsewhere.

Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away. Reread. Unfortunately I was not immediately aware that this was a reread and more or less didn't notice, because it was not particularly notable either time. Had I read this already, or was the plot and characterization that predictable? We now know the answer, but at the time either seemed plausible. (Again, traveling. Limited book supply.) It's not offensive, it's fine, it's just...gosh I hope to remember not to read it a third time.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth. Kindle. This is my least favorite Gaskell novel so far. This is the sort of book that you read and think, ah yes, we had to go through this to get to where we are, but...unless you're a Gaskell superfan (which, fair, hi, hello), I feel like a book whose thesis is "maybe we should treat women who have sex like they are fellow humans rather than demons from the lowest pit of hell, at least if they're otherwise completely angelic" is--hmm, I wanted to say that it's not something most of us need any more, but I think what I would rather say is that it's unlikely to reach those who need it in quite this form these days.

Bill Hayton, A Brief History of Vietnam: Colonialism, War, and Renewal: The Story of a Nation Transformed. On the up side, this introductory history of Vietnam contains a great deal of pre-20th century stuff that sometimes gets skipped over in Anglophone histories, and it's a quick read. On the other hand, it's an entire country, you may well find yourself dissatisfied by a treatment this short, and it surely was not consistent about things like providing pronunciation or defining terms, sometimes doing so repetitively and sometimes not at all. I hope there's a better starting place for this.

Mohamed Kheir, Sleep Phase. A short dreamy novel (yes) about emerging from being a political prisoner in Egypt in this century, readjusting to life outside and its changes. Glad I read it but will not want to reread it.

David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1773-1993: Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. So on the up side, Kirby is very solid about paradigm shifts like Sweden sometimes being central Scandinavia, in political terms, and sometimes being the northwest corner of the Baltic. Unfortunately his focus of scholarship (I've read his history of Finland) and the timing of this book (basically right at the end date in the title) tipped the balance towards him being one of the people of that generation who felt the need to come up with explanations for why it was inevitable or just or...something, why it made sense for the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to be conquered when Finland was not...without reference to bloody geography for heaven's sake get it together my dude if your explanation does not lean heavily on "Finland is a frozen swamp and the others less so," what are you even doing. Ahem. Okay. Anyway, it's in some ways a useful historical reference and in other ways a cautionary tale for not trying to make history more just and sensible than the world actually is. (Please note that I say "frozen swamp" with the deepest of affection.) (It's just, look, I know you all wanted to have impeccable reasons why it couldn't happen to you, but it could bloody happen to you, of course it could, that's why we had to let the entire Baltic into NATO ffs, it could happen to you any day of the week, victim blaming for your own comfort is not a reasonable worldview thank you and good day to you.) (The thing is that not a lot of people read Baltic history with no strong feelings about the Baltic, I think, and I am no counterexample.) (If more of this book had been about the Winter War, would he have...no, he's an historian of FInland, he ought to already have.) (Harumph.)

Ann LeBlanc, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. Kindle. A delightful novella about the lengths a genetically modified cheesemaking clone will go to in order to protect outer space's most perfect cheese cave. I had a good time with this.

Rose Macaulay, Told By an Idiot. Kindle. This is a family novel that follows its characters from the late Victorian period through the postwar period although since it was published in 1923, it's not very far into the postwar period. It's got her characteristic humor and observations of humanity and its foibles, and she's very explicitly talking about how The Young Generation is perpetually being credited with all sorts of new traits that have in fact been in humans the whole time. I love her, and this was a fun one for me, albeit with somewhat less plot direction than some of her others.

Charlotte McConaughy, Wild Dark Shore. This was the other book I read this fortnight with a catastrophically disappointing ending. It was going so well with climate change and botany and repairing families, but the ending upset and frankly really offended me--this is not an "I don't like sad endings" problem, this is an "I don't like what the shape of sad ending once again implies about the worth of women" problem. Not recommended despite copious botany and several seals.

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi. Discussed elsewhere.

Candace Robb, A Gift of Sanctuary. I managed to finish this medieval mystery novel without attaching to any of the characters even a little bit. There was a lot of "which one is he? oh right that one" going on in my head. I finished it, I left it in a rental apartment, I can't say I recommend it but it probably won't do you any harm.

Rosália Rodrigo, Beasts of Carnaval. Discussed elsewhere.

Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Kindle. Explorations of how the carceral criminal justice system feeds the carceral immigration system, sure-handed and angry where it needs to be.

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World. The fourth full-length book, fifth story, in the Dr. Greta Van Helsing series, and this one goes to the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell for its monster medical drama, and also to [gasp] New York. I would not start here, because there are character implications and because the previous ones are still in print, but I actually think you could. But also the previous ones are still in print.

Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. This was brilliantly done, pointing out that even the histories of the Age of Revolution that make an effort to include people of color are mostly still extremely focused on the Atlantic world, and things of interest were absolutely going on in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well. Interesting, well-written, hurrah.

A.G. Slatter, The Path of Thorns. A very classically formed governess novel but with a ton of magic stuff in it. Yay, enjoyed this.

Sarah Suk, Meet Me at Blue Hour. A sweet novel about two Korean-American teens in Korea coping with the results of a memory removal clinic while one of them has a grandfather in the early stages of dementia.

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. I've read several of this genre of book, which is case study of an ecological region and the humans who live in it being ravaged by particular companies who know exactly what they're doing and attempt to lie about it. This is probably the best one I've read so far, as it has very solid grounding in both disability theory and ecology, as well as the politico-historical chops for the research, and also the personal disabled/community connection to the subject, so if you only read one in this genre, read this one. (And hey, read one in this genre sometime, maybe, huh? You might think you already know how bad it is, and I promise it's worse.)

Sienna Tristen, Hortus Animarum. Kindle. A glorious collection of botanical poems paying tribute to loves that are not necessarily sexual or romantic but are definitely queer. One of the best indices I've seen in years, for friends who are index hounds.

Mai Der Vang, Primordial. The saola, a rare bovid native to Vietnam, is Vang's central metaphor here about the Hmong refugee experience. Some of the poems about it are stunning, brave, and vivid, but the whole is rather more monofocus on the one image (the saola) than I prefer in a collection of this length.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight. Kindle. This is a very silly book about a German princess who runs away to live in England in a little cottage and learns to appreciate being a princess. At no point does anyone consider that she is not inherently superior to all who surround her. It's briskly written and got me through waiting for an airplane, but I can't say it was wonderful enough that I recommend it more generally.

Neon Yang, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame. Okay, so there are books where the twist is the point, and there are books where you see the twist coming from a mile away and the journey is the point. This is definitely more in the latter camp, but unfortunately it meant that I started to find the protagonist frustrating for not also seeing the twist coming. Possibly this is because it's much harder to be in a fantasy novel than to read one. If you want a well-written sapphic knights-and-dragons story and don't much care about the plot, here you go.

 

conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
And I may have noticed that I need something new to listen to.

Now, I've said this before and I'll definitely say it again, but audiodramas are, hands-down, the gayest media I have ever consumed. So, in honor of the occasion, three lists:

The End's collection of LGBTQ+ audiodrama with at least one completed season

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ creators

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ characters
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In the process of exploring Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre, I discovered that not one but TWO picture book biographies of Cooney were published in 2024: Angela Burke Kunkel’s World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney and Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World.

The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”

Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.

Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.

Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
This is the same little squirrel that's been trying to break into my bedroom for the better part of the past ten days. Once it actually got into the house it was immediately chased by a cat and had cause to regret all its life choices.

We removed the cat and opened the front door very wide and absented ourselves from the area, so we think it's gone now.

Image of the squirrel at my window )

I think it's a baby. Not just because it's so small, but because the other window squirrels will shamelessly stand up or bang on the glass if they think they can catch my eye, but when this one realized I was there it hunkered down very small and actually turned its face away a little.

I hope it's all right now that it's outside where it belongs.

***************


Links )

monthly word count - May

Jun. 1st, 2025 04:33 pm
askerian: Serious Karkat in a red long-sleeved shirt (Default)
[personal profile] askerian
TOTAL: 5 697
:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

POSTED: nothin'!

IN PROGRESS
-In This Economy - bleach suburban ot4 (1 173 words)
-SVSSS Cosplay fic (4 149 words!! imma post chapter 2 soonish.)
-bleach: bloodsport (4 words) ( ;_; )
-Cherry Wine - MadaTobiIzu ABO (369 words)

this month has been good! finally managed to fix a scene i hated in the suburban ot4 chapter 10, AND managed to fix all the problems i had with the cosplay fic so i could finish chapter 2 and even start chapter 3, AND cherry wine!!! le gasp.

bloodsport lied to me about having inspiration and then promptly dying again. hrmghg. one day i will finish you, you jerk. one day...

--
teasers!

Read more... )
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose 60Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

Flicking embers into daffodils

May. 31st, 2025 05:05 pm
sovay: (I Claudius)
[personal profile] sovay
A nice thing to link to: Jeannelle M. Ferreira's "The House of Women" (2025), named after the site on Akrotiri because it is a story from when the mountain was Minoan and the walls of the city where libations were offered 𐀤𐀨𐀯𐀊 𐂕𐄽𐄇 were painted with dolphins and saffron gatherers. I have a great affection for this story with its ground pigments and grilled eel and lovers describable as sapphic a thousand years before the tenth Muse. Even in cataclysms, it is worth holding on.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
which is a soap opera with many of the trappings of a space opera. Interestingly, the show never comes down with a final opinion on whether or not it's a bad thing for those little planets to get absorbed by the empire/space UN or not - the protagonists mostly feel like it's awful, but almost everybody they meet who isn't from their home planets seems to think that it hardly matters who technically rules the planet so long as somebody does. But most of those people either have no context to claim an informed opinion or are themselves from the PSA, so....

On a different note, I continue to hold the opinion that their deceased friend may have had strong convictions, and he died for his beliefs, and he might even have been as remarkable and amazing as the two protagonists seem to believe, but he also sounds like a lot. Like the sort of person who doesn't want to get a cat because of abstruse concepts of moral philosophy that nobody cares about but him, but who sure is willing to keep arguing about it until they cave from sheer exhaustion, and then presumably keep arguing because they ought to have caved due to agreeing with his position.

************


Read more... )
genarti: ([tutu] dance your own story)
[personal profile] genarti
1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet

This was incredible???

More rambling about that )

If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.

(ETA: [personal profile] skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)

2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players

Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.

More thoughts (briefer) )

...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.

(no subject)

May. 30th, 2025 11:23 pm
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
[personal profile] skygiants
The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

May the 4th art dump

May. 30th, 2025 04:38 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
Sorry for no other real update but I have just been "bleh" at the thought of sitting down and typing when I have other things to do. Oops.

ANYWAY. I did seven pictures for the May the 4th Star Wars fanworks exchange! And I received 3 stories!

WHAT I GOT: )

The seven pictures I did, in no particular order:

Stolen Moment (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order Series (Video Games), Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cal Kestis/Merrin the Nightsister
Characters: Cal Kestis, Merrin the Nightsister (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

It will have to be enough



Irresistable Force Meets a Movable Object (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Leia Organa
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

I know that feel, Obi-Wan.



Target Practice (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: CT-9904 | Crosshair & Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Characters: CT-9904 | Crosshair, Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Additional Tags: Fanart, Treat
Summary:

A little practice never hurt anyone. Well maybe not *anyone*...



Guardian (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jocasta Nu
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

She would guard it with her life...and did.



Formal Portrait (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

What would young Leia choose for her first senatorial portrait?



A Fistful of Credits (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character
Characters: Original Sith, Original Jedi
Additional Tags: love them western vibes, Space Cowboys - Freeform, Fanart, Treat
Summary:

It's the first holodrama of its kind! It won't be the last!



Dark Seduction (39 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Corran Horn/Exar Kun
Characters: Corran Horn, Exar Kun
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

Prompt: "That scene where he appears to Corran at night but sexy"

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


In a magical version of the medieval Middle East, a middle-aged single mom, who was once the notorious pirate Amina al-Sirafi, is dragged out of retirement for one final job.

This book is a complete and utter delight from start to finish. It has all the pirate tropes you could possibly want - sea battles! sea monsters! quests for magical objects! loyal crews! tossed overboard! marooned! - and sly twists on others. It's got great characters. It's got hilarious dialogue and character interactions. The world is wonderfully detailed and varied, full of plausible historical details and with a lovely faux-historical feel. There are stories within stories. It's all marvelous.

As a child, I had a book called Muslim Saints and Mystics, which was a translation of parts of the Tazkirat al-Awliyā, a collection of stories about Muslim saints written around 1200. It was funny and magical, and some of the stories-within-stories in Amina al-Sirafi have a similar feel. The novel neatly toes the line between dialogue that feels fairly contemporary and a plausibly historical mindset. Amina is horny as hell, but a serious Muslim who believes in not having sex before marriage; as a result, she's had five husbands. There's a major trans character, in addition to several gay characters; Amina has come across people before who prefer to live as the other sex, and takes it in stride without resorting to Tumblr-esque labels or attitudes.

I loved every moment of this book, and was delighted that though it has a reasonable ending, it is the start of a trilogy. It's the first book I've read by Chakraborty, and I'm excited to read her City of Brass series.

Read more... )
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
at one point Holden sleeps over at a former teacher's house and wakes up to find that teacher patting his head, which prompts Holden to leave.

And I guess we can interpret that scene and the teacher's motive in a lot of ways, but I gotta say, I never expected one of those ways to be "Well, it's obviously innocuous, and the fact that Holden interpreted it as a sexual advance proves he's lying about the 20 times he claims he's been the victim of sexual assault already".

*********************


Read more... )

Book Review: Butter

May. 30th, 2025 11:08 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Recently [personal profile] littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.

This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.

Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.

They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.

Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?

In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.

The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.

Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.

This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.

And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…

It's mortal primetime

May. 29th, 2025 10:55 pm
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I helped cook for eight people tonight, since in a sort of semi-impromptu reunion, both of my mother's siblings were in town with their respective partners and the child of one of them, whose own child is graduating from college this weekend because time isn't even an illusion. My major contributions were sautéing a sort of smoky mélange of rainbow carrots and peppers and shallots and handling the pan-frying of the chicken breasts my father was dredging for the piccata while not scalding more than three of my fingertips on the steamed zucchini with dill. My mother's marmalade cake was enjoyed by all. I am now home in a somewhat deliquescent state, since I had two telehealth appointments before even leaving the house, but this total of people had not been in the same place since pre-pandemic and it was important to be one of them. I can't wait for this pollen season to be over. It turns out if you dunk a chunk of brie into homemade pesto, it's a brilliant idea.

read the comments

May. 29th, 2025 05:42 pm
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
[personal profile] asakiyume
It's a general truth of online life that you shouldn't read the comments--it's where the virulent nastiness lives.

Every now and then, that's not true though. After falling in love with the song "Xam Xam," by Cheikh Ibra Fam, I let Youtube take me on a tour of related songs.

It brought me "Gambia," by Sona Jobarteh, a beautiful song written to celebrate 50 years of Gambian independence (in 2015).

I happened to glance at the comments, and--my heart!
I'm a German, 55 years and my husband was a Gambian. He died here in Germany in 2011 (cancer). Today he would have celebrated his 62nd birthday. In 1998 he took me to his country and we spent there two years. This was the most beautiful time in my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like real living – I felt alive like never before. So I want to say "thank you" to my husband again, who showed me a place where my soul could breath. Whenever I feel down, doubting what this life is all about, I go back in my mind and think of those glory days.

And this...
Oh, i can recognise my grandmother at the end of this clip dancing with a group of women's. Thank you sister sona for futuring my granny. This will go down in history. Gambia for ever true.

And this...
I am from Ukraine and this music made me cry. It touches something deep in my heart. I think we missed Africa and we miss it. I play it and dance in the kitchen. I would like the whole world to go out in the streets and dance African dances. As not only live in our brains, but also in our bodies and our hearts.

And this..
From Somalia 🇸🇴 much love ❤️ our brothers & sisters 🇬🇲 beautiful country & beautiful people ❤️

And on and on...

"Am from Uganda ... I am from the Caribbean ... I'm a dutch old (63) man ... I'm latina from Colombia ... Je suis de la Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 ... I'm Argentinian ... I'm a Proud ERITREAN-AFRICAN ... I am from India ... I'm a japanese student ... I'm from Morocco ... I am welsh ... I am from Spain ... I am white African from Mozambique ... I'm Nigerian ... I am peruvian ... I am from Croatia ... I am from Bangladesh .... I am Congolese... Sending love from Ghana ... Greetings and best wishes from Latvia..."

(And several from the United States, too.)

All full of love for the song. Really made me feel like part of one human family.

Hummingbird Cottage Updates

May. 29th, 2025 08:09 am
osprey_archer: (cheers)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Important Hummingbird Cottage updates! First, I am sad to report that the geese after all decided not to nest on the pond, presumably flying off in search of a larger pool. However, the pond is still frequently visited by ducks and geese, and also a red hawk which swooped across the pond and snatched something small and dark from the rocks. You go, red-shouldered hawk! Keep the small rodent population in check!

The flowers have begun to blossom. Velvety purple irises, blue-violet columbines, yellow roses, lovely gold-pink roses like a sunrise, these last outside the window of the downstairs bedroom, which at last forced me to remove the mattress blocking the window -

I have not yet told the story of the mattress. So. At a mattress fundraiser for my old high school, I bought a queen size mattress on clearance, only to discover upon delivery that my bed frame was, in fact, a full. This ended with the mattress leaning against the window for a month, until the roses forced my hand, and I took apart the old bedframe and lowered the new mattress to the floor, where it will reside till I get an appropriately sized bedframe.

(Hilariously, a week after my mattress misadventure, my former roommate bought a new mattress for a bedframe that was surely a full. But NO. That bedframe was in fact a queen.

One would like this to end with the trading of the bed frames, but Julie understandably wished to keep the charming wooden sleigh bed and therefore cut it down to size.)

The weeds are getting away from me, in particular the lemon balm (a variety of mint that is spreading all along the shady north side of the house). However, yesterday evening I did get rosemary and chives from the farmer’s market, which I planted, having cleverly come out through the garage in order to keep Bramble inside… only to look up from planting the rosemary at the sound of a happy meow. Bramble trotted past, intent on exploring the neighbor’s patio, which I must admit I’ve also been curious about, so I followed him nothing loath.

The Hummingbird Cottage is half of a duplex - all the houses in this condominium development are, except the ones that are fourplexes - but I’ve never seen the neighbors in the other half of my duplex. Nor have I heard any noise from their half of the house, seen their car, or seen a trash can pulled to the curb by their driveway.

Through the patio door as I chased Bramble (happily hiding under an overgrown bush), I saw a dining room set with a jacket draped over a chair, so someone must live there at least occasionally? A mystery.

Bramble eventually scampered down to the pond, and then apparently decided he’d had enough, as he docilely allowed me to pick him up and deposit him inside. Possibly all that water was a little alarming. I finished planting the rosemary and chives and contemplated the best place for a cherry tomato plant, but as I have not yet acquired said plant, that is a problem for another day.

Also, I found the perfect little wicker cart for my houseplants! Admittedly there is currently only one houseplant, but now that I have a home for more they will surely come into my life. The cart is currently a somewhat battered yellow and needs a wash and a coat of white spray paint, but it was only twenty dollars at the secondhand shop, and anyway how often do you see a charming wheeled wicker cart for sale anywhere?
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sofía has been waiting for years for her twin brother Sol to return. He was taken away by their former owner, now employer, to serve as his valet during a stay at an expensive resort, and neither of them has been heard from since. Adalina, her owner's daughter and her best friend, insists on accompanying her--which means Sofía has access to the absolute most lavish and decadent aspects of the resort while she's searching for her father.

This is, however, a fantasy novel. So the resort is ominously not the paradise it seems. Instead of having her questions answered, Sofía gets lost in a jumbled spiral that even her scientist mind can't make sense of. No one around her seems to notice that anything is wrong, but the one thing she can hold onto--she hopes--is that she is there to find Sol, or at least find out what happened to him.

Most of the other specifics I could give here would be major spoilers, so I will just say some more elements of this book: intense grappling with the interpersonal ramifications of colonialism. Aro-ace heroine. Stubborn, imperfect, caring community members whose vision for their community doesn't always line up. Deeply weird magic happenings. And, of course, the titular Carnaval, in all its vivid glory.

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