selki | Recent Entries

Sadly, the country didn't wake up and take reactionary / white supremacist terrorism seriously enough in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, similar to how we weren't doing enough to protect health care practitioners and patients from anti-abortion terrorists, because the focus was determinedly on other threats as the "serious pattern" and time and time again, terrorism meant to choke our freedoms and our use of government to protect us was dismissed as "lone gunmen". It's been a long slide down since then, alas.

Health: I'm still feeling wrecked from having to work a lot this weekend on a systems patch that had serious problems. I took some of this afternoon off, and I'll take tomorrow afternoon off, as well. I'm glad that loved ones got to join the protests and got home safely.

History: 20 years ago this week, Eric Rudolph pled guilty to several bombings, including the Atlanta Olympics one. But it was too late for poor Richard Jewell's career and quality of life, the security guard who spotted the backpack containing the bombs and saved many people's lives, but was hounded by the FBI and media. Many people never heard that he wasn't guilty. He was fat. He didn't fit the "hero" profile.

Hugos: The finalist list came out and File 770 shows where to read/watch/sample many of them for free. I'll also note that my library app Libby has Ann Leckie's finalist, and Hoopla has several of the novellettes. I should get the voter's packet when it comes out, but no need to wait to begin reading/ranking. I'm glad that some of my Best Related Work and Fan nominations made it to Finalist status. I had not watched (nor heard of) "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel", nor am I probably going to watch all 4 hours of it, but I really enjoyed that creator's Last BronyCon vid from a few years ago. A couple of other notes: sad that audio dramas (podcasts) always seem to be ignored (though I keep nominating them), but happy that most of the Best Game/Interactive works were produced by smaller companies.

Books:

I finished China Miéville's Embassytown. It was great, I loved it, though its language geeking and protagonist/narration might not be for everyone. I leveraged my Philosophy of Language class from college and much more recently, Ann Leckie's *Translation State*. :-)
I enjoyed a private book discussion on the first four stories in the anthology *The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories*, "from a visionary team of women and nonbinary creators"
I led a good library Zoom book discussion on Denise Kiernan's non-fiction *The Girls of Atomic City*, about different women who came from different places to work in different capacities at the secret Oak Ridge, Tennessee plutonium-processing base in WWII. Here's a 9-minute NPR review/article. Of particular relevance to me was the discussion of Yankee reaction to grits (so good with butter and pepper!) and assuming Southern accents meant "stupid". The book itself had some very tough parts (discrimination, medical experiments on Black people, etc.), but we had a good time overall discussing it and our mothers' experiences of WWII, and one person brought up a point I hadn't thought of about the land seizures and Appalachian resentment of the federal government. We're doing *The Hound of the Baskervilles* in April; all are welcome!

Work

Two of my teammates stepped up on fulfilling different security documentation requirements instead of shoving them onto me since I'm so good at documentation -- after I managed to restrain myself from volunteering myself in the first place (I have so much work to do that's more my responsibility to do, without adding that).
The aggressive new fed has left me alone for a while, though he's invited me to a one-on-one for 2 Mondays from now (I think he meant it to me Monday the 31st, but I accepted his April 7 invitation as-is). I hope in a 1 on 1, we can have a more productive conversation.

Health: My checkup last week (and blood draw) was slightly better overall than from December. My doctor still doesn't like my numbers, though, and prescribed another drug for me to add to my regimen.

Chores: I finally buckled down and chipped away at the very first part of my long-overdue financial chores, and organized some of the other information I'll need. Still 3 important documents I need to unearth from my basement, and much more to do, but at least I moved a little forward.

Options I'm considering, in order of increasing excitement, but I'm open to input from anyone who's leaning one way or another. I COULD try to attend more than one, since they'll be virtual, and cherry-pick events from each, but that might just exhaust me.

ArvCon, a Twitch streaming weekend fundraiser for the Damon Runyan Cancer Research foundation -- I've participated and given several years. Lots of well-run RPG games, concerts, and readings (and giveaways). Example schedule from 2024
Wiscon is all-virtual this year. I've only attended once, and that was in person, and there's not much information yet. Still, feminist SF con.
Balticon is going BIG on virtual this year: Balticon Anywhere, with many streaming events and some virtual-only panels and spaces, over Zoom, Discord, and YouTube.

I'm afraid I had unknowingly bought into the white supremacist myth of Ulysses S. Grant as a boozy incompetent surrounded by corruption, if not personally corrupt. The Klan and their fans spread this slanted story because Grant had cracked down so hard on them, and they were mostly successful at spreading this myth. White supremacists didn't want people to remember him as a hero preserving democracy for all. Sure, Grant had his prejudices and drank too much, and there was some corruption (no worse than a lot of other administrations; he trusted his friends too much, alas). But HE formed the centralized Justice Department, and HE sent armed forces AND federal prosecutors after the Ku Klux Klan (though Congress wouldn't fund enough of the latter), HE was determined to put them down as far as he could with the resources he could.

I learned about this today while listening to a 2023 episode of the Lawfare podcast, America’s First War On Terror with Fergus Bordewich. I'm still going through their back episodes, which have a lot of illuminating episodes about legal and other history in the US, though I'm skipping a lot of more recently-topical episodes that would only dishearten me (more). I asked my library to notify me if they get a copy of Bordewich's book on this history.

I weep for our Department of Justice today.

While I'm mentioning Lawfare, an unrelated episode from 2023:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter-the-british-empire's-territorial-peak-100-years-later-with-matthew-parker
I don't weep for the British Empire.

So, a little more about China Miéville's 2016 novella The Last Days of New Paris (publisher's link). I won't link to the Wikipedia article again since I realized it has significant spoilers at the end, as do MANY of the reviews I looked at. I understand the impulse to make it clear to the prospective reader what's going on, but Miéville wrote his story like a flower unfolding (as he describes one of the painting manifestations in the story) and I think it's unfair to the story to spoil the major plot elements. I'll mention some elements instead: alternate history, magic, back and forth between 1941 and 1950 (more divergent than 1941), a 69-footnote epilogue wherein the author comments & alt-texts on individual artworks he referenced in the story, starting with Leonora Carrington's Velocipedes (I've written about her before). What interested me so much about the story is the Surrealists' resistance to Fascism through their art -- which was an aim of many Surrealists of the time. They didn't want to be cogs in the capitalist machine, which was why they also fought some with the "Free French" (who were anti-Nazi like them, but also wanted to go back to everything like it was before the invasion). There were multiple people with competing, and sometimes mixed, agendas in the story, and varying degrees of desperation. The main narrator came young and late to the movement, but has become old/worn by the battles. But he loves Paris in all its self, not a prettified Disneyland Paris. I recommend the story, but not everyone is going to enjoy it.

If I get laid off, maybe I'll post a vid of the 69 different artworks and talk about his comments and my thoughts on the artworks.

Happy Vernal Equinox tomorrow, all!

Books
I've decided to not finish a couple of library books/series, even though they have interesting ideas in them and I will read with interest anything that others post about them.

The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe: Some very cool stuff about stored memories going into body prints, rebels/saboteurs, colonialism and ecological havok, and people trying to survive after ~crash landing on a planet, some of them somewhat sympathetic. But it's very long, and a lot of lying, and apparently there are two more books after it that that aren't any shorter and perhaps not satisfying from what I've read from one person.
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner: Booker prize finalist, author is National Book Award finalist. American corporate spy attempts to infiltrate a French anarchist agricultural group, maybe seduced by their head, who has a lot of ideas about evolution, Neandarthals, and mental health / evo psych. Smart writing (I read a paragraph to my sister), but I'm just not in the mood to read a corporate spy's POV. Interestingly, I just read today an article about how anti-industrial sabotage has been the most organized/effective in France: Why Climate Activists are Turning to Sabotage, from a Mastodon post I read.

I *am* continuing with China Miéville's Embassytown (library audibook), though I don't understand what all is happening with the language and the aliens and the Ambassadors (or the protagonist's broken marriage and career on the downslide, for that matter). However, "not understanding what all is happening" is common with this author and yet I've been able to finish several, excited about a couple of them (*Perdido Street Station* and The Last days of New Paris; I may write about that more later). I may break down and read the Wikipedia article before I finish the book. Certainly AFTER I read the book, if not before.

Also, I picked up Haruki Murikami's sequel? to *The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World* which I had really liked back in the day, though I only cracked The City and Its Uncertain Walls (library hardback) open and then re-read some of an old mystery instead, so far.

Personal chores
There are some big LONG overdue chores in my own life (financials + passport replacement) I keep putting off, sometimes with games and reading, and sometimes with "creative procrastination" "clearing the decks" working on other chores that are not as crucial instead, e.g., this post. I'm having real trouble getting on with the important things that require thinking and grappling. The situational depression (this timeline, and see below), that isn't helping, doesn't look to be clearing up any time soon. Sympathy and encouragement welcome, coaching/GAS probably counter-productive.

At least I got over 8 hours of sleep each of Thursday and last nights (I'd been waking up too early and not getting back to sleep for weeks).

Business
Got a shock Thursday and Friday. My team's new federal lead asked me aggressive questions about my/my team's work style and seems to think we've been covering up being unproductive (we have been very busy with operational work, which we do track) because we weren't able to give him specific metrics in 2 days (that no one had been asking for before, so we hadn't been working in a way to capture information to provide those metrics). He "asked" twice in rapid succession, with raised voice, "Are you telling me that you've never [used a work management tool to track work]?" "Are you telling me that you've never [something else about work management]" and kept cutting me off when I tried to explain this is where we are NOW (DevOps: start from where you ARE) and we can adjust our work style going forward. He then denied I had told him at the start of the meeting we could provide one specific metric he'd asked for. And, he told me and my team how much he hates (not with that word) the tool we administer (it's not the only tool we administer, but so far he hasn't listened to me on that, either), it's ok for tech stuff (pipelines) he guesses, but not for work management he says (it's flexible and different projects use it differently (tell it to the project managers, not us!), so there's no one-size-fits-all report to run; almost every project at my client uses this tool FOR work management), he doesn't understand why we're using this tool (I said it was in place when I arrived in 2019 and pointedly did NOT say "you feds picked it, not us"). I'll discuss all this with my manager Monday (he was out Thursday and Friday). And I'm going to take some time off later this week.

Other teams he's now leading who were in one of the awful meetings with him and my team, told me he's been cutting them off, too.

At the end of the Friday afternoon meeting (4 meetings about metrics in 2 days), he did say something like "Well, this has been a contentious meeting, I hope you all have good weekends and we can (regroup?) next week". Which is not the worst way to end what became a terrible work week.

I don't read a lot of fiction that glorifies monarchies these days, but I'm mildly interested in the history and personalities of the Claudians and Ptolemies in the ancient world.

Long ago, I watched the I, Claudius BBC production (on Masterpiece Theater). My sister and I listened together to most of the I, Podius podcast which discussed each episode and sometimes interviewed some of the actors, and I finally finished it off a couple of weekends ago.
I love Jo Graham's books set in the Ancient World, including Hand of Isis (Charmian, servant of Cleopatra; poly-friendly, takes religious devotion seriously)
I've listened to The History of Rome podcast from a little before those times through to the end (I did listen to alllll of Mike Duncan's *Revolutions* podcast, down with tyranny!).

Wednesday night in procrastination, I finally pulled Michelle Moran's Cleopatra's Daughter from my TBR bookshelves, and got pulled in so much that I finished it that night. Cleopatra's daughter Selene really was sent to live in Rome with Octavia, Emperor Augustus' sister, and later became the queen consort of Mauritania. This story imagines what her growing up in that family as their power grew was like. I liked it a lot for the most part -- a different but plausible view on some of the children with whom she grows up and the adults she has to cope with, and a perspective on how slavery corrupts the enslavers. I would have liked it better without the following issues: There was one historical error that didn't greatly affect the plot, although jarring to me (Alexander the Great was not a huge hulking warrior), and a dramatic subplot invented out of whole cloth that seemed implausible to me. Overall, I'd recommend it, if that sounds like things you could deal with as a reader.

...

Charming seal pup rescue story from this week (with cute pix!)

Here's what I have so far; I'll enter them in the form later today. I have until the end of the day March 14 to add/rearrange. I might look at some of the entries in the Renay / Ladybusiness etc. Hugos 2025 spreadsheet to see if there's anything I want to read to ID any others to add to my nominations.

( My noms )

I am still so angry and disheartened professionally over the uncleared thugs (foreign? in debt to foreign agents/nations?) plugging their unsecured laptops into our Treasury and OPM systems, handing data over to AIs whose ownership and controls are unclear, and making untested undocumented changes to production. Insider threat embraced, the worst data breach ever, and they claim it's for "efficiency" (see recent Death Panel podcast, "Theater of the Austere"). It goes against my employer and government security training (repeated every year for 15+ years), against my 30+ years of configuration management, and against DevOps shared responsibility, transparency, and feedback culture.

I realize that a lot of the other legal and illegal activities going on are having worse immediate impacts on individual humans, but the above is sickening, I'm taking it personally whether I want to or not, and it makes it hard for me to continue believing anything I'm doing at work is really meaningful. And as my sister pointed out, here come a lot more incidents of identity theft, and I can't imagine the economy won't crash as they sledgehammer a lot of the agencies and tasks that were keeping things going.

...

Here's some unrelated history I've been meaning to write about. I've been listening to mostly older podcasts and audio books, not so much current events, though obviously I'm hearing some news.

Richard Theodore Greener, famous at the time in his own right (first black graduate of Harvard, and many accomplishments) and the father of Belle da Costa Green, JP Morgan's personal librarian (I'm leading a library Zoom book discussion next week about her).
Robert Forsyth, first US Marshall to be killed in the line of duty, 230 years ago in Georgia, by a fraudulent preacher whose devotees bribed/busted him out of prison and he moved to Kentucky, and then got rich doctoring and real-estate speculating. But Forsyth's son John went on to negotiate the treaty with Spain acceding Florida to the United States, fwiw.

With a bit of hesitation due to some issues I had with Glasgow Worldcon (previous entries on that), I signed up again as a volunteer for upcoming Seattle Worldcon. I had checked the box on willing to volunteer when I registered as a virtual attendee and WSFS member the evening of Jan. 31 so I'd be able to nominate for Hugos. They sent me a link to fill out volunteer info this morning. It doesn't look like they have virtual volunteer positions listed yet, but they ARE supposed to have some virtual programming, so I put that in comments. They also asked for a brief bio. I'm not sure as a virtual volunteer I'd be listed anywhere, but I filled it out anyway:

[Given name] has been in fandom since running Dr. Who conventions in North Carolina in the 1980s. She's guested on multiple podcasts about SFF books and movies, and also enjoys making custom liquid nitrogen ice cream flavors. DevOps by day, DEI/IDIC all the time.

I'm no longer listing my previous 10-year Penguicon affiliation (major volunteer and program participant hours) as a bragging point, since they pretty much got played by / bowed to trolls last year, including giving private information to them, but that's what the LN2 reference is about. I really enjoyed reaching out to and making custom flavors for GOHs and some other program participants, along with designing and executing flavor themes for events with the help of my LN2 crew. Oh well, I wasn't going any more since COVID.

Overall: It's the year of the Snake now, and what a time to be alive, isn't it? I've had a bit of trouble being productive (I do have some good days), but as the Death Panel podcast concludes every episode, "Stay alive another week!", and I'm doing that. Playing games and reading/listening a lot isn't the worst way to cope with the horrible things going on in the world. A little too much pizza, but I am also going for nice neighborhood walks fairly often with my live-in sister, when it's not raining or super cold. She, by the way, is moving to be closer to a different loved one in a few months, so I'll be going back to default hermit mode, which will be an adjustment -- it IS nice to have sympathetic family around for mutual support. I'll still have some family in Frederick and Baltimore, though.

Bad: Although nobody at work is talking about this stuff (thankfully; I need not to think about it ALL the time), some of our feds were literally holding onto pets during remote meetings last week. Our agency stance is that we're "clarifying" until all feds must return full time to office in March -- no room for the contractors at the new building, unless most of the feds quit. I don't know how many will fall for this early retirement con game (I remember well how people fell for the Twitter early retirement and then were surprised they didn't get the money they were promised; some sued). I'm expecting my do-gooder grants-administering agency to be gutted eventually on top of all that. I'm probably missing some of the bad news by not reading all the news, but I'm trying not to be angry/flattened/doom-scrolling too much of the time.

Good: I have savings, someone close to me is finally getting better from some surgery, and my sweetheart will be by in a bit -- we both tested and will mask on the back porch, as he's been helping out at the hospital a lot. My sister is going out to get steak and potatoes to bring home and cook for dinner after he leaves. Steak will be a rare indulgence! It's been at least a year and a half; I'm dubious that getting any steak meal delivered from a restaurant would be very good. So that seemed like a nice birthday celebration for us. Seeing Hamiton in NYC for our 50th birthday seems like a lot longer ago than it was chronologically.

Civic duty: I went in for jury duty a couple of weeks ago and was ready to serve, but several cases were settled that day and they told about 50 of us we could just go home instead of going through the selection process. The closest I've ever come was being empaneled for a medical malpractice civil suit, but that one also settled juuuust before trial.

A podcast I like recently recapped an episode of an old TV show which treated white Southern hostility to Reconstruction as a kind of quirky joke, which enraged me. I spent time putting together an email to the podcasters, and thought I'd post most of it here, too (lightly edited, really not trying to pile on to them, but I've skipped the nice introductory and sign-off paragraphs).

I've never been President Grant's biggest fan, but the idea of kidnapping him or even talking him into a tour of the South to show him the "harm" that Reconstruction was doing is scriptwriter apologia for white supremacist lies then and now, whether they meant it that way or not. Reconstruction was the federal pursuit of land, education, and voting rights for Black Americans, against most white Southerners' desires. Sure, there may have been some issues with Reconstruction administration (e.g., petty corruptions), but it was nothing compared to the hundreds of years of enslavement, robbery of labor, and brutal repression of the involuntary immigrants from Africa.

I understand that y'all are Canadians, and I'm not chastising you for not knowing about US Reconstruction and white supremacists' negative self-serving portrayal of it. I appreciated that you disclaimed knowledge of Reconstruction on your show and were only relating the storyline as written so we'd understand your discussion of the episode. [...] The thing is, I have learned some Reconstruction history, mainly because of my Southern US hometown's horrible past: biracial progressive elective officials were overthrown by a white supremacist violent coup. That was decades after Ulysses S. Grant's presidency, but it's all connected with the rhetorical and sometimes violent pushback against Reconstruction by white supremacists during the decades leading up to 1898.

Some US history books grapple with Reconstruction and white supremacist backlash, many condense it to a few paragraphs and pretend it has nothing to do with the present, and most school textbooks don't even do that, skipping straight from the (US) Civil War to "The Gilded Age" and World War One. Wilmington, NC (my hometown) covered up its sins, named a park after one of the coup leaders, and it took almost a century for this disgrace to be treated honestly and seriously by mainstream historians. The coup had been whitewashed after the fact as the necessary suppression of a black riot (not true) and accepted without a murmer by the state and the US governments, which only led other white supremacists across the country to know they could do with impunity what they wanted in other places.

I'm just this week listening to a podcast episode about Reconstruction and its dismantling -- I have to keep pausing to cool down, but I need to know this stuff now more than ever, sadly, as its relevance is not going away any time soon: Scene on Radio: Capitalism: S4 E4: The Second Revolution

Work

Shutdown [wouldn't have affected] me for -- the contract I'm on is funded [somehow].
It was murky for a while whether Biden's "Christmas Eve off" would apply to the agency we support, but yes, our agency is closed Tuesday (as well as Wednesday). Yes, I'll need to spend a vacation day for that, but I have plenty I've been unable to spend this year (the rest will roll over).
I'm juggling a LOT of team and near-team absences for the next couple of weeks, more than usual for Christmas & New Year's. But we're covered.

Health

November was a very rough month mood and self-care wise. I finally started pulling out of it this month. For one, the haircut a couple of weeks ago.
Also, I've been more careful about my food lately, I'm feeling better, and my doctor was happier with my numbers at my physical this week.

Items I'm interested in that are coming into public domain in 2025, that I keep meaning to check if there are audio versions (not that I have time to record for Gutenberg.org, but in theory)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_and_the_Lost_Empire -- I remember enjoying the opening, though I'm sure there are problematic parts. Starred the audiobook already on Hoopla for a listen sometime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Queue -- Josephine Tey mystery, excellent. Starred the audiobook on Hoopla for a listen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Earth TBR, Starred ebook on Hoopla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(novel) by Nella Larsen. TBR. Starred two audiobook versions, plus an audiobook of another collection of hers, *Beyond Passing*, on Hoopla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Boy_(novel) by Oliver La Farge. TBR. Starred audiobook on Hoopla. Apparently there's a movie, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kani_K%C5%8Dsen by Takiji Kobayashi. TBR. Ebook only available in Spanish on Hoopla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Companions by J.B. Priestley. TBR, 2 different movie versions and a BBC reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_on_Resolution TBR.

Happy Yule, happy Solstice, and happy Christmas for those who celebrate!

Work: My terrible subordinate (thrust on me a couple of years ago) got a new job, the client won't approve a backfill, and they seem to want us to move to us pro-rating all the infrustructure and common services work across the individual applications. Despite their not approving a backfill, they have at last made DevSecOps a "product family" which appears to be a puzzling hodgepodge of components, given part of me to a new federal lead (matrix management). That guy is meeting with his uppers and will impart to me any clarification he obtains. The micromanagery fed lead's scope has retrenched to no longer include me. My longest-time federal lead (for Change Management, not currently included in DevSecOps) is retiring in February, so further rearrangements may ensue. My actual manager and I are rolling with all this uncertainty. The DevSecOps fed lead is good with me being frank with him (I don't vent, but I don't put lipstick on, either). I'm taking off all Wednesdays in December, mostly for my mental health (attitude problems I've noticed, hopefully others haven't) and some chores.

Hair: Y'all may remember my hairdresser of 20 years died (COVID, I think). I had found an expensive but excellent hair-cutter who was very pro-masking (all customers, she and her mom who cleaned up around the place). But then her mom died (?) and she hired a young assistant and gave up on masking precautions, and parking there was a pain. After a long time of cutting my own hair, I finally hauled myself to the nearest Hair Cuttery this month (I'd looked for a local independent, but couldn't find any nearby with recent good reviews), and they gave me a cute haircut (including pleasant hairwash) and worked around my mask just fine with no attitude.

Other than the above, books.

Each star a rung,
night comes down the spiral
staircase of the evening.
The breeze passes by so very close
as if someone just happened to speak of love.
In the courtyard,
the trees are absorbed refugees
embroidering maps of return on the sky.
On the roof,
the moon - lovingly, generously -
is turning the stars
into a dust of sheen.
From every corner, dark-green shadows,
in ripples, come towards me.
At any moment they may break over me,
like the waves of pain each time I remember
this separation from my lover.

This thought keeps consoling me:
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed,
no poison of torture make me bitter,
if just one evening in prison
can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.

-- https://allpoetry.com/A-Prison-Evening

I've been doing some spooky reading for the month, but ran into several I'd thought I'd like, but didn't. If you know of a reason I should pick one of these back up to finish it, let me know.

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji: Released in English in 2022, recommended to me by Hoopla when I was looking for Agatha Christie, looks like a take on her *And Then There Were None*, but I noped out when one of the visitors to the island getaway was running a fever but had come anyway. I just can't with a plot/character like that these days.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julie Armfield (2022): Surely I'd like an horror/SF about a lesbian couple dealing with one's transformation? after a mysterious incident during her undersea research expedition ... but this novel alternates between long grinding passages by the one who'd been left behind, who is very retrospective about their relationship and it sounds like it was *never* very good, and much too short passages by the one who disappeared remembering parts of her expedition.
Working Weekend by Penelope Hill: Horror writer at a horror convention, in the sub-genre "murder at a genre convention" that's fun when well done? But it turned out the main character was too off-putting, griping about his ex-wife's alimony etc. Feh.
The Cloisters by Katy Hays: set at the museum in NYC, research and tarot cards, but I couldn't hack the bad choices our naive protagonist was making.
A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee: Magical vengeange, that is. I'd started this last year and meant to finish it for October, but I remembered I'd been as unhappy with this protagonist's choices as well (each was a woman falling under the influence of a rich manipulative woman), and decided I didn't need to finish this one either, either.

But I DID make myself finish Elizabeth Gaskell's Lois the Witch, and Other Gothic Tales. Um. Everyone dies in these stories (well, not ALL the characters, but pretty much every protagonist (and others, too), if I remember rightly), after varying lengths of gloomy foreboding (I *finished* it, but I did skip ahead a few times for the title novella). I mean, I knew it was going to be Gothic, but I didn't think it would be SO unrelentingly unfortunate for them. Quite the different mood from her sprightly *Cranford*!

On the bright side, I've taken some lovely fall walks, in company and solo, and I had a lot of fun recording on a podcast about Roger Zelazny's *A Night in the Lonesome October*.

First, on self-care, I got a massage, I got a pedicure, and I made a little bit of progress on organizing tax info to catch up and file.

I read (and listening, including audiobooks)

Caitlin Kiernan: *Agents of Dreamland* (2020), audiobook from library I got after I heard a podcast discussion (Eldritch Archive?) of one of her stories from *Houses Under the Sea*. This book is a series of interrelated stories dealing with agencies from multiple agencies/sides dealing with an eldritch apocalypse potentially on the way. I liked it ok, but it didn't grab me like the one I heard from *Houses Under the Sea*, and I see that now the library has an audiobook of that, so I've favorited that in Hoopla to circle back some time -- and *The Ammonite Violin and Others* for good measure
Roger Zelazny: *A Night in the Lonesome October* (1993): My sister has the excellent Roger Zelasny reading of one of his favorite books and my favorite book of his, but I was in a hurry to listen to it and she was on a road trip and had the CDs with her, so I listened to the library audiobook read by Matt Godfrey instead, which wasn't as terrible as I'd remembered, though he doesn't catch Zelazny's dry humor quite as well. Why was I in a hurry? I'm going to be on a podcast about it and wanted to re-familiarize myself with it -- I convinced some other folks to read it and discuss it with me (a musician, an IT security geek, and an artist). Whoo! Snuff the ~dog narrates events leading up to a fateful Hallowe'en night, with a colorful cast of characters.
T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon): A House With Good Bones (2023), I love my library so much, another audiobook from them. A much-delayed visit home to NC and unearthing of family secrets. There are vultures, and a gardener Phil who slowly grows on the protagonist. CW: some fatphobia by antagonists (resisted).
Delia Sherman's *The Porcelain Dove*: I LOVED Sherman's collection *Young Woman in a Garden* (great use of language and variety of setting, characters, and tone). This book, however, was a dark magic wrapping around a long story of a French lady's maid leading up to and through the French Revolution. It's well-researched, convincing, and I think the weaving-together works well enough, but I can't say I loved any of these characters. Read her collection first, or read Paula Volsky's *Illusions* for a different magical take on the French Revolution, although that's from the POV of a teenage noble woman who has a lot of growth to get through, so YMMV.

My sister's on a road trip, so I'm hermitting this week.

I'm leading a library discussion Oct. 17 over Zoom on Jane Austen's *Northanger Abbey*. As is my wont for old books these days, especially ones I've read before (as I had with this one), I checked what audio options there were for my library and my podcast app. Readers, there were MANY. And I did what I enjoy doing, which is to alternate between versions chapter by chapter. With 31 chapters, I listened to over 20 different narrators/crews, discarding some after only one chapter, and returning to others when I could. And that's with some versions being unavailable to me so far (one audiobook is still on hold at the library, and I can't tell from the library app who its narrator(s) are).

I rated the versions/readers as I went along. I suspect not many of you will care for the details, so I'll put them under the cut.

( Notes on Northanger Abbey Audiobook versions )

Something that's been mildly annoying me for years is dramas set in the far future where people (non-historians) are fixated on music & movies & other pop culture from my lifetime. It's always seemed so gimmicky to me, a quick way for the writers & showrunners to make the characters more "relatable". In-show, though, it seemed to be contemptuous towards all the people in between us and them. Are there going to be no great movies/music/creative output in the next 50-500 years? Examples:

Demolition Man (1993): Sandra Bullock's police officer character has a poster of Lethal Weapon 3, and it's not just her obsessed with 20th century. You can hear discussion on this movie in the latest (former Hugo Best Fancast finalist) Skiffy & Fantasy "Torture Cinema" review of the movie.
Space:Above & Beyond (1995-1996): fighter pilot plays AC/DC in his cockpit
Various Star Treks
Among the Stars and Bones (audio SF xenoarchaeology drama on for the last few years, very good in a lot of ways, I support on Patreon):Stargate, etc. At least many of them are archaeologists, interested in the past, but would they really chastise each other for not knowing old movies?
Copperheart (audio SF drama on for the last few years, very good in a lot of ways, I support on Patreon): at least we can tell [something is wrong] when one Star Wars fan suddenly [spoilers], so it's at least USED in the plot.

The in-show reason finally came on me in a flash when I listened to the most recent commentary episode for Among the Stars and Bones when two characters look at each other and say "Stargate!" when they discover something:

AI.

It's AI's fault. AI floods everything (music, art, books on Amazon, tv/movies soon) from late 2023 to the far future with dreck, making it hard to find anything good, and making folks assume it's all dreck and therefore not worth looking at anything produced after 2023, unless it's been personally recommended to them.

Why did it suddenly come to me? Because I realized, it's how I consume media these days. Take how I use YouTube now. Since I've been listening to music on it for years and years, it's been pretty good at recommendations for me. But now a lot of what it suggests seems like AI dreck. So I no longer look at anything it suggests immediately after the video stops playing, because I can't see the production date there. Instead, I go back to the home page for its short recommendation list where I can see if it was published 2023 or earlier, unless it's by someone I already follow. And now I'm ripping a bunch more of my old CDs to listen to them on my laptop, instead of resorting to YouTube.

I know this issue isn't hitting just me, a mere consumer. Heather Rose Jones of the excellent Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, which talks about new/upcoming sapphic historical fiction/fantasy books (all the ones she can find) in her "On the Shelf" episodes, has talked several times about it getting harder and harder for her to find real books on Amazon, because there are more and more AI junk books being published and slapping all the tags on whether they apply or not.

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