js_thrill | Reading

This puzzle game by Scottish studio DMA Design takes as its inspiration the myth that lemmings (arctic rodents) mindlessly fling themselves off cliffs. In the game, lemmings (pixelly humanoids with green hair and blue leotards) fall from a trap door and begin marching mindlessly to the right, oblivious to cliffs, fire, lakes of acid, and other deadly hazards. When they hit a wall, they turn 180 and march the other way. It's your job to guide as many of them as possible safely to the exit.

lemmings fall from above and walk to the right, away from the exit that is immediately to the left. one has just exploded in a shower of pixels

lemmings fall from above and walk to the right, away from the exit that is immediately to the left. one has just exploded in a shower of pixels

To accomplish this, you can assign individual lemmings one of eight skills: Climber (climbs vertical walls), Floater (uses an umbrella to survive falls), Bomber (explodes after 5 seconds, leaving a crater), Blocker (stands in place and won't let other lemmings past), Builder (builds a staircase), Basher (digs a horizontal tunnel), Miner (digs a diagonal tunnel), and Digger (digs a vertical tunnel). Each level offers a limited number of skill assignments, so you have to use them strategically to create a path for the others.

Lemmings was wildly popular in the '90s, spawning multiple expansion packs, sequels, and spinoffs. As a child I don't know if I was really aware of what a global phenomenon it was, but it was certainly a phenomenon in my house, considering the countless hours my brother and I spent trying (and usually failing) to stop the cute little dummies from marching to their doom.

( cut for length )

The original Lemmings is unfortunately not commercially available. If you've misplaced your floppies/cartridge, various releases are available as abandonware. I was playing the DOS release on DOSBox, which runs fine but you may need to edit some files to defeat the copy protection. If that doesn't sit well or sounds like too much trouble, there are also several fan-made freeware clones that are supposed to run on modern systems, though I have not personally vetted any of them.

redbird

Adrian came home from the supermarket with a lemon-sized melon, I think called "pepino." We have all tasted it, and it's disappointingly bland.

My thought was "bland cantaloupe," and Cattitude said there was a bit of a grassy flavor. Still, it was worth trying.

Before that, we went to the Copley Square farmers market, and bought a loaf of bread, a cabbage, beets, radishes, and blueberries. We also had lunch at the market, empanadas (beef and mushroom for me, plain beef for Adrian and Cattitude), followed by ice cream. Frutti Berri are there on Fridays, so I had saffron rose, and they went to FoMu, where Cattitude got a root beer float, his first in years, and Adrian had "Cookie Monster."

sholio

I was tagged on Tumblr on a "5 favorite fics you've written" meme and - while I don't do these all that often - decided to do this one and ended up cramming at least 15 in there and could EASILY have done more.

So I figured I'd copy it over here. (On a side note, it turns out that Tumblr's HTML editor generates "clean" HTML; I thought I was going to have to paste into the rich text editor on DW to avoid having to recode all the links, but the results were - urgh - and then I switched the tumblr post into HTML to copy that out, and it worked perfectly.)

( An ever-expanding cornucopia of favorites )

DW really doesn't have the "tag people into a meme" culture of Tumblr and similar sites, but feel free to get it spreading around DW as well if you think it looks fun!

landofnowhere

World Without End, Amber Reeves, 1912. Early 20th century feminist and socialist Amber Reeves may at this point be most known as one of H. G. Wells's many girlfriends and inspiration for his book Ann Veronica (see my comparative book review where it gets the worse end of the comparison); I heard of her first as mathematician Dusa McDuff's grandmother (that link will be interesting to feminists as well as mathematicians). I read her novel A Lady and Her Husband a while back after reading Ann Veronica.

Anyway, I mentioned Reeves to

kurowasan who is always looking for more women authors to get into Project Gutenberg (though she can't project manage Amber Reeves's books herself as they are still in copyright in Canada) and ended up lookig up what else she had written. This is Reeves's first novel, published as The Reward of Virtue in the UK, which is in some ways a more fitting, if sarcastic, title for the book than its US title World Without End. But the experience of reading a book titled World Without End and not knowing it's going to end was interestingly open-ended. Like Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill, it's a cautionary tale about an unprepared young woman marrying too young, with a badass liberated woman or two in the background, but the two protagonists could not be more different. Evelyn Baker is wealthy, lively, self-centered, and the book does a good job of showing her as a rounded character with more depth than her better-educated peers see in her. The story starts with her birth, and does the child point of view very well. As Evelyn matures, the story turns into a marriage plot, and there is excellent social commentary and criticism of purity culture throughout. When I was getting near the end I wasn't sure how the story would wrap up in the pages left, though the ending more or less worked. ( ending spoilers ).

Terre des Autres, Sylvie Bérard. Francophone SFF book club is a thing now, and has moved on past Élisabeth Vonarburg! It turns out that wanting stuff that is easily available in English translation is more of a constraint that we'd realized, especially for Quebeçois authors, but we were able to find this book, which you will now be getting weekly updates on. We're on a desert planet with reptile aliens and human settlers who are at war with each other, and the book has made it clear that it's in conversation with the Western genre. The part I read include a bit that worked well as a self-contained short story but I'm wondering where things will do next.

redbird

Over the last few years, we have sorted and decluttered enough that we no longer need the large storage unit that Cattitude and I rented when we had to move into a small apartment on short notice, in 2019.

Adrian did a lot of the work, both mental and physical. We gave away a lot of books, and also things like an air conditioner and an exercise bike.

We now have a much smaller and less expensive storage unit, which we hope to have cleared in a couple of months (the units are rented by the month).

After Cattitude and Adrian got home last night, having moved things down the corridor and officially given up the old unit, we had the traditional post-moving pizza for dinner.

Current Mood: pleased

pauraque

In this sequel to A Memory Called Empire, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and her imperial liaison/maybe-kinda-girlfriend Three Seagrass travel to the front lines of an interstellar war on a mission to try to decipher the alien enemy's language and establish diplomatic relations. What Three Seagrass doesn't know is that Mahit is also on a covert mission to sabotage diplomacy and keep the Teixcalaan Empire mired in an endless, unwinnable war.

I was so-so on A Memory Called Empire. I would say I had a stronger reaction to the sequel, both positive and negative.

First, the positive: I loved Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada, new characters in this installment. She's the passionate, brilliant captain of the flagship, he's her loyal, cerebral first officer who adheres to a stoic alien philosophy. They deal with high-stakes ethical quandaries as the lives of millions hang in the balance, and they love each other with an intensity that goes largely unspoken. Is this aspect of the book pandering to people who love Kirk and Spock? Perhaps, but I had a great time being pandered to. I wanted the entire book to be about these two.

I mostly liked the stuff about establishing communication with the aliens too, which is also classically Star Trek in tone and approach. (It bugged me a little that the linguistics wasn't more realistic, but you rarely get that in SF and it isn't really the point here.)

Unfortunately, the things I liked were pretty definitively outweighed by all the half-baked themes, garbled political messaging, and many characters' infuriatingly stupid choices and baffling cluelessness. It wasn't quite throw-the-book-across-the-room level, but at certain moments it got close.

Ranting and spoilers

- How can it possibly take SO LONG for the characters to figure out that the aliens are a hivemind???? It's not just that it's a basic SF trope and obvious to the reader from literally the first page of the book. It's also that all the prompting the characters need to make the leap is right there in front of them the whole time! Mahit herself has Yskandr's mind in her head, there are the Sunlit guards and the Shard pilots who share their perceptions through technology... To these characters, the existence of a species with a shared consciousness shouldn't even be surprising. But it still takes them 400 fucking pages to figure it out, and they act like it's a galaxy-shattering shock. This makes no sense whatsoever and it makes most of the characters look inexcusably dumb.

- I don't get the way the Mahit/Three Seagrass relationship is written at all. In the first book, they liked each other from the start and then nothing happened with it until suddenly they kissed at the end. In this one, they have a stupid fight at the beginning and feel weird and uncomfortable around each other for hundreds of pages until suddenly they fuck. This didn't work for me. It especially didn't work because I felt like I was supposed to side with Mahit in their argument, but I didn't, because Three Seagrass doesn't know what Mahit is mad about and Mahit refuses to tell her. Mahit's narration is explicit that she wants Three Seagrass to know what's bothering her without being told, so basically she's punishing Three Seagrass for not being fucking psychic. Am I the only one who thinks it would have been more interesting if they'd actually ever talked about any of the issues between them, rather than just winding themselves up about it in their heads?? By the end I wasn't rooting for them to get/stay together at all, so when Mahit ran away from the relationship (again) I didn't even care.

- I felt the lack of gender stuff in the first book was a missed opportunity. In this book, the author seems to be strenuously trying to miss that opportunity as hard as she can. There is one scene where Mahit (in their shared consciousness) accuses Yskandr of not understanding fashion for "female-bodied people." It's brushed off. There's another scene where Three Seagrass says she wasn't sure if Mahit liked people of her "gender and sex," and several where Three Seagrass silently wonders if she had sex with Mahit, or with Mahit and Yskandr, or just Yskandr. No further discussion of these points. I truly don't understand what Martine is going for here. She chose to create a protagonist who is a woman sharing a mind and body with a man. She seems dimly aware that there might be interesting things one could say about this. She apparently doesn't want to say any of them.

- Even leaving aside the gender issues, I think there's a lot more that could have been done to explore the mindsharing scenario. Yskandr often reads like an invisible sidekick who just pipes up now and then to give Mahit some information, advice, or a snarky comment. What is his experience/consciousness/sense of embodiment like? We don't get his own internal monologue, just the things he "says" to Mahit. It doesn't feel as weird and alien as it seems like it should.

- Mahit and Twenty Cicada should have talked! He's assimilated to Teixcalaan in some ways but maintained his cultural distinctiveness in others; doesn't that seem like an extremely relevant perspective for Mahit to hear? The books act like Mahit is the only one in the galaxy who has mixed feelings about Teixcalaan, but surely she can't be.

- On a larger level, these books are about an absolutist expansionist empire and the vulnerable republic it threatens, and nothing about any of that is resolved or even really explored all that much. The child heir Eight Antidote is an interesting character and he's trying to do the right thing, but there's so much more going on here that can't and won't be resolved by a kid with some moral fiber taking the throne. Having a relatively nice emperor does not solve the problems of imperialism. In this book we learn more about how systemically fucked up Lsel is too, and nothing happens with that either. The plot doesn't even make it hard for Mahit to decide whether to stay loyal to Lsel, since there are power-mad authorities on Lsel who want to KILL HER. No wonder people were expecting a trilogy here; this book does not wrap up a single loose end.

Okay, that's probably more than enough of a rant. TL;DR: Book dances around a lot of interesting speculative and interpersonal possibilities and solidly lands on very few of them.

lydamorehouse

My least favorite weather condition: humidity.

Last night, in fact, I slept on the floor in the sunroom because I could not stand the humidity. We live in an old house without central air. Shawn will also get migraines if cold air blasts on her head too much from a window unit. So, we have our air-conditioner in the sunroom as a compromise. The master bedroom connects to the sunroom and so, when it's actually too hot for Shawn (a rare event) we can close up the bedroom and extend the air-conditioning. Last night, Shawn was fine without and so I made a pillow fort and slept on the floor of the sunroom. Not necessarily due to the heat, but because I could not stand sticking to everything and one of the things air-conditioning does is dehumidify.

I can't say that I slept super well last night.

I'm getting a bit old to sleep on the hard wooden floors. (Or I need a real futon mattress, like they have in Japan.)

Today is a day off work and I have a bunch of things I need to do today, including calling Lakewood Cemetery. When we last visited Ella's grave we noticed that the nearby tree's roots are shifting her stone. I need to call and have them reset it and see how much that is going to cost us (if anything?). ~~I also need to make an appointment for an oil change for the car. (Just did it.)~~

Otherwise, there's not a lot to report. I worked at the library again last night and... it finally happened. I started work at 2 pm and by 3 pm I had shelved all the books. I am not joking. There were simply no more books in need of shelving, full stop. Luckily, there is something else I can do as part of my job called "wanding." The "wand" is a hand-held device that scans the RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) cards pasted inside each library books and automatically checks its status. 99.9% of the books end up registering as "available" (aka checked-in.) But, occassionally "missing" books will show up. I think that our library, in particular, ends up finding so many missing books because we are asked by the library, when we find piles of abandoned books around the library, to check those in as "used items" (for statitistical reasons.) I have noticed that the missing item option is RIGHT NEXT to the used item and I have to imagine that sometimes library staff are accidentally marking them missing instead of used. Or... something else must regularly trigger the missing tag becasue I have found WAY MORE books that are missing than you'd think would be possible. Last night, for instance, I found three of them and in the two hours I spent wanding I only got through Adult Fiction A-G.

But, speaking of books, today is Wednesday and so I shall report on my reading for the week.

I returned the Marie Kondo book (Letter from Japan) last night and, in exchange, I took out a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook--technically, the one I took out is an adventure anthology. Basically, it's a collection of one-shot ideas. The D&D group that I run is full of adults with busy lives, so it always behooves me to be prepared for an absence or two during the regular campaign. When a one or more people can't make it, I try to run one-shots. I will probably not "read" this book in the traditional sense, but I've already had fun glancing through it.

The thing people don't always remember! Libraries often have RPG sourcebooks!

It's been fascinating to me that I think I may be the only library staff who regularly checks books out. At Ramsey County, it was very typical to be in the back room and see circ staff and librarians heading home with piles of books under their arms. Here at Anoka? Not so much. However, I'm not sure that this means that they're not readers. After all, I use Libby all the time for e-books and audiobooks. Most of the reading I did this last week, in fact, was online using Comics Plus.

Again, if you want a detailed review of any of the titles I list below, please feel free to check out my manga blog at: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/

I Love You So Much, I Hate You by Yuni. An office romance gone bad. This one is a yuri (f/f.)
There Are Things I Can't Tell You by Edako Mofumofu. Adult men who love each other, but suck at communicating. Yaoi (m/m)
Don't Call Me Dirty by Kanbe Gorou. Busy-body twink adopts homeless guy with mixed results. Yaoi (m/m)

I am also in the middle of reading a yuri (f/f) series called Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord by Yodokawa. I'm currently on the fourth volume and enjoying it, but the cover art had me expecting a very different kind of story. The cover art is super appealing to someone like me who absolutely adores a slow slice-of-life where nothing happens except maybe the seasons change, so it's time to go look at cherry blossoms or build a snowman, you know? But, actually, the story is all about an ex-idol trying to live a normal life and the manga editor she ends up shacking up with... there's just generally a lot more plot that I expected? It's been fine, but not what the covers promised at all.

I also have not gotten around to reviewing called My Lover is Just to Innocent to Handle by Hirota, which is basically a all boys' school love affair with a very ernest, sincere love interest. It's the first time I've seen an exchange diary passed between two boys, which is interesting especially as they seem to not use it to talk about anything much at all--other than make secret meet-up dates. It's a comedy and I have talked a lot on my manga blog about the fact that humor is not actually as universal as we'd like to think, so comedies are often very hit and miss for me. This one was cute? But another one where I feel slightly misled, this time by the title. The inclusion of the word "lover" implies a whole different kind of relationship than what we get (which is fine! These kids are in high school!)

I'm in a very weird place with my manga blog because I am, for once, desperately behind on reviewing everything I've read. (Usually, I'm just not reading.) I still have not even tackled Kowloon Generic Love Story which I read so long ago now that I might have to re-read it. I haven't reviewed it because I'd only read four volumes of it and it feels like the meat of the story hasn't yet landed and so I was waiting for something more conclusive to comment on. I may just have to go ahead and review what I've read, but, anyway.

Maybe I will spend part of my time today catching up.

I have not had a good audio book in the queue since I bounced out of A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar. I did watch all of the live-action movie of Cells at Work. They did some interesting things, merging the original with Cells at Work: Code Black and... I guess, upping the stakes in a way I was unprepared for. But, it was enjoyable enough that I lost sleep on Monday night because I wanted to see how things ended.

I was also struggling to find a good podcast to replace some of the false starts and landed on a delightful one called Historical Homos, which I started listening to last night. One of their first episodes is about Le Chavalier d'Eon whom I'd known nothing about, who publically transitioned in the early 17th century in France. She was a trans woman who, in the fashion of the time, preferred to dress as man. (Sounds confusing, but isn't. I am a woman like Le Chavlier d'Eon, after all. Joan of Arc was a woman like Le Chavalier d'Eon.) I will say that if any of my trans friends listen to this episode, I was a little irritated that the hosts insisted on using all pronouns kind of indiscriminately for Le Chavalier d'Eon, even though she spent the majority of her life as a woman. (I'm not sure their reasoning, as Wikipedia uses the correct pronoun, imho, throughout.) But, the two hosts are very irreverent and "slutty" and I found them generaly the kind of entertaining I need when I need to unwind from *gestures at everything.*

How's about you? Read or watch or listen to anything good lately?

lydamorehouse

In my infinite wisdom, I agreed to pick-up an extra shift at the library yesterday. I think I have previously explained the whole weird culture around holidays at Anoka County, haven't I?

In a nutshell: when I first started (and Memorial Day weekend hit as one of my scheduled weekends to work,) I was told that I MUST make up my missed shifts within the pay period or use vacation/PTO to "cover" missed days. I immediately argued that this can't possibly be a requirement since I was both willing and able to work the hours as assigned, but denied by the workplace a chance to perform them--aka you scheduled me to work, I can come, but you told me no, the building is closed, you can not. But, if "making up" was, indeed, a requirement, what happens if I can't/I don't have enough PTO to cover the lost hours? Like, am I going to get fired because you scheduled me to work when the library was closed and I only just started and don't have the time acurred yet to "pay" for my "absence," which was not even my choice???? Many emails to HR later, I was told that, actually, if I want to take unpaid time and not use vacation that was fine. Any time. I don't ever have to use my vacation to "cover" hours in the case where the library is closed and I am scheduled to work. (This, btw, big shock to my boss... who has, I believe, spent her own vacation to "cover" time for decades.)

At any rate, I like getting paid and I wanted to demonstrate that, despite coming out of the gate fighting, I am a Team Player. Since it's the culture of this workplace that people to make up for time when the library is closed, I decided to work 10:30 am - 2:30 pm on the Monday after the holiday weekend.

What can I say? The job continues to be FINE.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to bond with a number of my coworkers. I had that one good conversation with the young person who is trying to decide what to do with her life now that her student loans are paid off, but that's it. Yesterday, I found out that one of the librarians (lesbrarian?) comes with a wife and I thought, foolishly, that this could be a thing that might bond us on some level. I, too, have a wife! But my attempts to communicate that were either awkward on my part in some way that I didn't realize or... kids these days don't see queerness as enough of a bond? Or both. I'm going with BOTH. But yeah, our conversation went something like this:

Me: Did you do anything fun over the holiday weekend?
Lesbrarian: (Answer that involves her and her wife getting to be the cool aunties.)
Me: Oh, that sounds awesome. I went to a science fiction convention (a bit of information about that), but my wife stayed home. She's not into the convention scene.
Lesbrarian: ...
Me: ...
Lesbrairian: ...
Me: Uh, there was some cool cosplay. Do you want to see pictures?
Lesbrarian: I wouldn't get the references.
Me:. Oh.

CONVERSATION TERMINATION, Abort! Abort!

One other time, several weeks ago now, I also had a similar conversation with someone else at work that was an abject failure. To be fair, that one started out rough because the circ staff person in question was explaining how you find a date on the copyright page and, even at the time, but not in enough time to filter myself I realized I was a bit too snarky in pointing out that I am quite familiar with copyright pages in books and where to find them. This, I think, put her on the back foot and I felt stupid and rude and so I tried to course correct, but it ended in this disaster (paraphrasing):

Me: (awkwardly) Uh... so, how are you otherwise?
Them: Not great, actually.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. What's the issue?
Them: *stares politically* Oh, you know, children are starving in Gaza and queer rights are eroding here.
Me: ...
Them: *stares more intensely in politics*
Me: (Not knowing how to signal that I am on side, I sort of stammer out:) Yes, well, uh... that is all awful and affects my family a lot, you know, since I am married to a woman.
Them: ...
Me:...
Them: I am also queer.
Me: Okay?
Them:...
Me:...
Them:...
Me: (awkwardly turns away to continue putting books in order on cart).

CONVERSATION TERMINATION, Abort! Abort!

So, like, I don't know if the problem is that everyone is very introverted and so conversations are generally difficult and awkward or if I'm vibing as an asshole somehow? Which, I mean, I could be? (See above where I accidentally snarked too hard and knew it.) I do have a tendency to just show up at work, do my work, and go home so maybe I am the cypher that no one knows how to approach. The person who has talked to me the most is definitely one of the problem employees, so maybe people assume that we are two of a sort? (She happens to be an SFF fan--like fan-fan, goes to cons, etc.) Anoka hasn't felt the kind of place where I'm encouraged wear my pride buttons on my lanyard, but maybe I should start? Maybe everyone is on edge because they work in a suburb? I certainly have felt that way. I've actually kind of presumed that I was the only queer person, but it turns out there's a bunch of us?

I am hoping that time will solve this, but I'm not entirely hopeful.

lydamorehouse

Image: Downtown Minneapolis (from Nicollet Mall, near the convention hotel.)

This one will probably get long, so I'll try to remember to put some of it under a cut.

I did not go to Convergence on Thursday, since I had to work that night. STUPIDLY, I also agreed to work today--so, if I don't get through the whole convention, I'll pick the story up wherever I left it off tomorrow.

FRIDAY, (my) Day One.

( Transit complaints and cosplay... )

SATURDAY, (my) Day Two

( a short day... )

SUNDAY, (my) Day Three/Final Day.
( panels and goblins... )

sholio

I went through a batch of lingering prompts in my Tumblr inbox (dating back to the start of this year) in late June/early July and got caught up on the backlog.

1. Babylon 5 - Londo/G'Kar sex pollen

Posted on AO3 here (explicit; 3700 wds)

***

2. Biggles - kid!Fritz and touch-starved Erich

( 800 wds under the cut here )

***

3. Murderbot - Gurathin's augments go out while escaping something in the CR

( 1200 wds under the cut here )

***

4. Babylon 5 - Londo having visions of AU realities

( 1300 wds under the cut here )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

DEAR ABBY: I've been a widow for nine years and just got engaged. When I asked my fiance if I could put a picture of my late husband in our new home, he became upset. He said he shouldn't have to walk into his own home and look at pictures of a man who once "had" me.

I have three kids with my late husband. We were high school sweethearts, and I took his death extremely hard. I can't help but think that my fiance is overreacting. I feel he wants me to just erase everything I had with my husband.

My kids will be living with us, too. Should I respect his wishes, or should I stand my ground and make sure my late husband's memory is alive for the sake of my children? -- REMEMBERING IN AMERICAN SAMOA

( Read more... )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Eric: My spouse is unable to say "Oops, sorry." He automatically denies having done the thing or blames me or my son – even if he literally just did it in front of me/us.

It's been an issue for decades. We first went to counseling because he left a shower head pointing at a weird angle, so water got all over the wall and floor when I turned on the shower. He saw me mopping up and asked why, and I matter-of-factly told him he'd left the shower head pointing out of the shower. I expected a "Whoops! Sorry about that." (Which would have resolved everything instantly.)

Instead, he took a snippy tone and asked, "Why didn't you check the position of the shower head before you turned on the water?"

Over the years, this pattern has recurred. Recently, he wasn't flushing the toilet regularly. I asked him nicely not to leave number-twos behind for me to find, and he responded with an aggressive "You don't know that it was me!" (I had just seen him leave the bathroom.)

I have repeatedly tried asking him to remain calm and explaining that this behavior causes me to lose respect for him and that it damages our relationship. I have explained DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) to him.

Counselors have in the past put the onus on me to preface any negative feedback with a request that he not rile up. Which works pretty well, assuming I have enough emotional presence of mind to pre-regulate him as I am also regulating myself.

Help! This affects me cumulatively. Every time he does it, I feel angrier.

– “The Divorce Came out of Nowhere"

( Read more... )

pauraque

In this casual co-op birdwatching game, you and up to 10 friends explore a nature preserve with the goal of photographing all the different kinds of birds.

in a colorful stylized autumn landscape, cylinder shaped people with cameras converge on a rock pigeon sitting on the ground — *The adventuring party converges on a Rock Pigeon*

This game really captures the ways in which birding is like Pokémon. (In fact, it's said to be particularly reminiscent of Pokémon Snap, but I haven't played that game so I couldn't tell you.) There are all these little creatures with funny names all over the place, and you've got to, well, catch 'em all. There are even shinies, which are sparkly rainbowy versions of a bird that make delightful UFO sounds when you get close to them.

( cut for length )

Flock Around is usually on Steam for $4.99 USD but it's currently on sale for $3.99, and for the price it's absolutely worth it. I have played many games that offered a lot less fun for a lot more money!

redbird

Now that I'm sure my Teva sandals fit well enough for me to walk to the store and back, I have ordered a second pair online, as planned. This pair is purple, which they didn't have at the brick-and-mortar store. Mail order has real advantages, but shopping in person let me try them on. This is one of four or five different styles I tried on that afternoon.

Yesterday was the first time I'd walked any distance in these sandals. I grabbed them while pulling on clothes and hurrying out before it got too hot (extreme heat warning starting at 10 a.m. yesterday).

For my reference, these are Teva Tirra sandals in a women's 9.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Okay, look. I am pretty sure this novella was not written specifically to be the pilot for a filmed TV series. It could have been, though. I am the world's least visual person, and there was not one part of this fantasy mystery that I could not clearly imagine as it would be handled by specifically a British mystery producer. This was a very odd experience for me--not a bad one, but very odd.

This is very much an overtly gay Holmes and Watson analog--they've been around the world together, they are clearly a couple, they are so much clearly a couple that they--well, there's a frame story, let's put it that way, and the frame story is described as a mystery but really is not. The central mystery deals with fantastical relationship with trees in an isolated community, and also there's a B-plot about their relationship, but it's a long-established relationship, not a new one. It's very sweet. It's not very much about whodunnit. But if you like trees and procedurals--yes, hello, hi, it's me--then this is a charming little bite of a novella that will be a good way to spend your time.

pauraque

This sequel to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi picks up the story with kinda-ex-pirate Amina and her crew on a quest to track down a dangerous magical artifact for the peris (air spirits) with whom Amina struck a bargain in the first book. This time it's a spindle that can alter the threads of fate, said to be in the hands of a witch on an island in the Persian Gulf shrouded by supernatural seas, where ships run aground no matter how skilled the sailors are, and nobody ever comes back.

I loved the first book in this series so I was eagerly awaiting the sequel, and it didn't disappoint. It's another seafaring adventure, this time with a slightly darker tone. It's less episodic than the first book, mostly dealing with this island and the mystery of the witch, her origins, and the suspiciously idyllic society she's created around her with the descendants of shipwrecked sailors who are all so very happy here... but can't actually leave. It's also less of an ensemble piece, with most of Amina's crew sidelined for much of the story. Instead it focuses more tightly on Amina's complicated friendship with the prickly alchemist Dalila, who's only pretending to be seduced into the witch's inner circle so she can steal the spindle... right? There's also more development of Amina's relationship with her semi-estranged husband, who is not only a self-involved jerk and annoyingly hot, but also a literal chaos demon.

With all of these relationships, I really like how the bonds of magic intertwine with bonds of emotion. It's not just, oh, this magical effect is a metaphor for how the character is tempted into something that's not good for them. It's that magic is happening and mundane interpersonal and emotional stuff is also happening, and it feels really cohesive and convincing to me.

I did think there was a bit of a structural hiccup towards the end where the reader learns the truth of what's going on too early, making it feel like it takes too long for Amina to figure it out. But that's a minor issue in a book I otherwise totally enjoyed. I had to tear through it at breakneck speed because I couldn't renew it from the library (someone else was waiting) and that was not a hardship for me at all!

lydamorehouse

Image: A chipmuck with cheeks so stuffed with sunflower seeds that she looks like a capybara.

So, yeah, I had this new bird in my bird feeder the other day. I will admit? Shawn and I have always secretly WANTED chipmunks in our yard. Yes, we know they are destructive little so-and-sos, but LOOK AT HER! So cute!! Also? I was this many years old when I learned chipmunks can climb trees. I guess I just never lived around enough of them to know this? I sort of assume they were ground only being "ground squirrels."

I had a day of animal sightings the day I took this picture. This was taken on Tuesday and I know this because I went to the Roseville farmer's market this very same morning and, on my way there, saw a COYOTE! Yep! She was crossing the road with what I presume was maybe this little fellow's cousin in her mouth, headed into the several acres of farmland that the University of Minnesota has to the north of its Saint Paul campus for its ag students. I suspect she was bringing breakfast home to pups, as it was just after 8 am. Same night, on the way to work, I saw egrets in the little swampy pond that I pass on my way to work. A red letter day! (or its pagan equivalent.)

Otherwise, I have mostly been hunkering down, trying to survive this heat. Today, so far, it's not bad. It's 74 F / 23 C, but, unfortunately, it's also only about 8:30 in the morning. I am hoping it doesn't get too much hotter. We are, at least, expecting thunderstorms this afternoon. It's been a good year for rain. Our currant bushes in the backyard fruited for the first time since Mason was in Elementary School, and I suspect that's largely due to the amount of sky water we've been getting.

Oh, and Convergence starts today? It being Thursday, I work today, soI won't be going until Friday afternoon. I should probably give you all my schedule (also this means my family can find it easily too.)

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Friday (July 3) - 12:30 pm (in the Space Louge) : Performance of "Sincerely Yours" with Cole Sarar with musical accompaniment by Caly McMorrow.

Saturday (July 4) - 9:30 am : "Life Lessons Anime Taught Me."

Sunday (July 5) - 11:00 am : "Exploring Fandom Alternate Universes" (which I am moderating, sort of, as the person who requested this panel is on the panel so I will likely largly cede the floor to her.)

Sunday (July 5) - 2:00 pm : "The Art of Resisitance"

=========

I will try to give you all another of my typical con reports, but I failed to do that for Quantum Con, so I probably shouldn't promise anything.

Oh, and I should probably report on Shawn's LATEST trip to Urgent Care. I do not know how Shawn gets this unlucky? But, she has some kind of contact dermatitis that seems to have become a staph infection. Of course, she's taking so many drugs for her various other conditions that she has to be on an antibotic that's kind of INTENSE (and not the doc's first choice). This is the first time, she's been INSTRUCTED to take a probiotic with her antibotic. So, that's not fun.

We have no idea what happened. It's on her calf and she's pretty sure she brushed up against a plant? But, we don't have poison ivy in our yard! Maybe somewhere there's a hidden stinging nettle, but whatever it was, it produced a single blister from which all of this is spreading out from.

Sheesh. This poor woman has the worst luck.

Otherwise, life continues apace. How's by you?

landofnowhere

The Linleys of Bath, Clementina Black. I finished this, don't have much to add to last time except for a brief shoutot to Ozias Linley, the eccentric intellectual and freethinker of the family. I still would like some more modern commentary putting this in historical context and pointing out the ways that Black shades the truth; some of these I can figure out by checking against Wikipedia, e.g. that Black gives no hint that the daughter that Elizabeth Linley Sheridan gave birth to shortly before her death was the result of an affair.

Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Book-Shop, Christopher Morley. Rereads. I actually read Parnassus on Wheels a while back, around the time I recommended both books to

osprey_archer, but I didn't write it up at the time. I actually meant just to sample it, but it is engaging enough that I ended up rereading the whole thing; it is still a very cute romantic comedy with two people aged around 40 and a bookmobile. The Haunted Book-Shop is less grabby, and introduces two rather silly young people and a thriller plot, but still has a bibliophile charm.

Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context, edited by Thomas Schmidt and Benedict Taylor. While I don't think that the Composers in Context series was intended for people who potentially thinking of writing fic about the composers in question, I think it's actually pretty good for that, as well as generally readable. I will note that, even though it's from 2025, it uses the misquoted version of the letter that Fanny's father wrote her when she was a teenager, which I posted about here -- it seems like Anglophone Mendelssohn/Hensel scholarship has been completely unaware of this correction which has only appeared in a 2022 German-language manuscript.

mrissa

Jorge Aguirre and Andres Vera Martinez, Monster Locker. A cute, fun middle-grade graphic novel in the same sort of shape of "young person deals with the legends of his personal ancestors as well as his individual self and contemporary aspects of culture" that the Rick Riordan Presents line of (prose) novels have done so well. If the library gets the sequel I will probably keep reading this series--it's very charming.

E.K. Johnston, Pretty Furious. Oh geez can Johnston write small towns. Can she ever. The eye for detail and social dynamics just blew me away. This is not the kind of small town fantastika that she started with, it's mimetic fiction, but that's okay, I did not need dragons, a group of teenage girls supporting each other and hell-bent on justice was entirely enough.

Isabel J. Kim, Sublimation. I really liked this science fiction novel about doubling of selfhood and immigration, and I felt like she walked a very difficult line very successfully, of being aware of some of the really worse outcomes for immigrants right now without making them the focus of a book where she clearly wanted to talk about a different but also at times difficult shape of immigrant experience. It's vividly written, and I recommend it.

Fonda Lee, The Last Contract of Isako. Fonda Lee thinks about the applications and consequences of violence so well. The action scenes in her books are never tacked on, they're always very much to the point and illuminating the thoughts she's having about violence in systems and individuals, and I think it's just so beautifully done. This is a science fiction hired goon book, more or less, and I had a lot of fun with it but it was not the "oh you rogue with your clever quip" trope that the speculative genres sometimes see with hired violence, and that was all to the good too.

E.C.R. Lorac, Bats in the Belfry. Kindle. This sure is another Golden Age mystery that I enjoyed for what it is.

Yotam Marom, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness. This book walks the line between activist call to arms and personal memoir. I think Marom's personal experience in activism and organizing can be extremely useful, but there are times when the type of personal discussion involved muddies the waters a bit and makes it harder for me to recommend this to as many people as might have benefitted from the other side of it. Ah well, still interesting.

Freya Marske, Bodies of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. David (who is a friend) is not kidding with this subtitle. If you're an academic looking for straightforward, concrete advice about writing for the broader public, he's got your back, clearly from experience.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters. Reread. Gosh this is simultaneously not-Shakespeare and all-Shakespeare-in-a-blender. He got better with time but I still enjoyed rereading this, even though it turned out not to apply to a potential project at all.

Anthony Price, A Prospect of Vengeance and The Memory Trap. Rereads. Finishing up the series reread, I feel like these last two sort of...illuminate the line between "ramifications and consequences" (one of my favorite series elements ever) and "rehash of previous events," which I sort of felt like these were. Poor Price, the world he was writing about had fallen apart while he was writing it. I still like the early part of the series, but I think the later ones are unlikely to draw me on a reread, which is fine, knowing where to stop is good.

Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon. A linked-story novel about settling a planet and its environmental-social relations for the humans doing it. Really liked this, even though I wanted it to be a bit more of a unit than it turned out to be. I'll enjoy the reread more knowing to expect what it actually is.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs. Kindle. Light-hearted and humorous stories doing the thing his plots do basically all the time. If you're in the mood for the thing he does, he sure is doing it here. (For me this made it a great thing to read in my hotel room during Fourth Street, a break from the intense kind of thinking that convention produces.)

magid posting in

agonyaunt

A member of my staff has asked that we change their name and their pronouns to they/them. We have done that without question, of course, and have delivered training to colleagues. It is not up for negotiation. We honor this request in our company.

As a part of this, they also have adjusted how they refer to themselves, using “we” rather than “I” and asking us to refer to them as a collective rather than a single being. They base this on identifying with the Internal Family Systems Model and feeling they have multiple personalities within them. They refer to personality traits with names and assign responsibility to these personalities for mood, attitude, and work habits. They DO take responsibility for these things personally and are receptive to feedback—they accept and integrate and work on improving skills. In conversations about issues, though, they refer to that being X person’s influence or that Y just isn’t online today, that sort of thing.

This person is not, as far as I can tell, under the care of a mental health professional.

I am not a psychiatrist. I do not play one on TV. And I am not about to pretend I know what’s going on here from a mental health perspective.

What I do know is that when a person refers to themselves as “we,” the vast majority of people understand that to mean more than one person. And, when the person sometimes speaks on behalf of an company or group (but most times do not) people receiving any “we” will, understandably, assume that person is talking about their whole team, department, or company.

This has obvious impacts. They are on vacation and they’re out of office says, “We are on vacation.” They report about a project and they say “we accomplished X.” They are out sick and so, “We are out of the office today.” Does that mean only they are? Is their entire team out? Is the whole department on vacay? Do we celebrate an accomplishment of one person or the whole team?

It is very important to me that I honor the (be it harmless or legally required) requests of the people around me when it comes to their identities and needs. It costs nothing to be kind!

But, this is having a negative impact on others and I cannot take care of one person’s needs while diminishing another’s.

So, what is the right thing to do here? How can I honor the needs of the team for clarity and understanding?

Do I ask this person to use “I” while honoring their “they?”

( Read more... )

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Lewis Powell

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Lewis Powell

Reading

Lemmings (1991)

melon: pepino

Five or possibly 15 or 20 favorite fics

thursday books are lesser-known

storage unit

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (2021)

Sticking to Everything

Anoka Continues to be Weird (or it's Me)

Convergence 2026

Tumblr promptfic catchup - Biggles, Babylon 5, Murderbot

(no subject)

LW's signoff says it all

Flock Around (2026)

sandals

The Killing of a Chestnut Tree, by Oliver K. Langmead

The Tapestry of Fate by Shannon Chakraborty (2026)

Chippy the Capybara?

thursday books are a blast from the past

Books read, late June

employee wants to use “we” when referring to themselves

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May 2026

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