silverusagi

Walk it off, buddy.

I hope everyone’s been enjoying their shiny new print volumes! The publisher’s in the process of shipping everything now, but they’re a smaller organisation so they can only handle so many shipments a day. If you haven’t received your order yet, hang tight, it’s being worked on or is already on its way!

In the meantime, I was informed yesterday that the Kickstarter for volumes 3 and 4 is right around the corner. In fact it officially kicks off July 20th! These books go all the way through chapter 15, every page lovingly edited and reformatted and in many cases, featuring redrawn and touched up art. I’ve been busting my butt laying it out the past few months and I hope you’ll consider adding these books to your shelf! Follow KICKSTARTER HERE so you’ll know when it launches :)

~Ashley

https://unsoundedupdates.tumblr.com/post/821541065528049664

wordsmithdaily_feed

https://wordsmith.org/words/yonder.html

adverb, adjective: Over there; at a relatively distant place.

https://wordsmith.org/words/yonder.html

ladyherenya

Time to review some more books.

• The Paris Match by Kate Clayborn: Soon after Layla arrives in Paris ahead of her ex-husband’s sister’s wedding, she discovers that Emily is having doubts about getting married. The only other person who knows this information, other than the bridal couple, is the best man, Griffin. Layla’s initial interactions with him haven’t been amicable but they agree to work together to support Emily and Michael during the week of pre-wedding festivities. Griffin is determined to ensure that the wedding proceeds as planned. Layla just wants Emily to be able to focus on her relationship so that she can make a decision without being distracted by stress or drama.

This is obviously the set-up for a romance between Layla and Griffin, but I was most interested in all the mysteries. ( Why did Layla get divorced? What’s the story behind Griffin’s burn scars? Would the wedding go ahead? )

• Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone: Lenny’s latest baby-sitting gig in New York is looking after a seven year old Ainsley. Ainsley’s grumpy uncle who lives upstairs is instantly suspicious of Lenny. After Miles confronts her, Lenny ends up confiding in him – that outside of her work, she is a mess, because she’s grieving for her childhood best friend and avoiding going home to the apartment they shared together.

Miles has lost close family members and is currently struggling to connect with his sister and his niece. He suggests that he and Lenny help each other.

When I first read the blurb, I thought this arrangement sounded contrived but in context – Miles has already observed Lenny in several situations and found out that she’s yet to do anything on her “Live Again” list before he comes out with his awkward and not fully coherent proposal – it felt believable. ( This book is like a warm hug. *gets distracted rereading* )

• Call Me Maybe by Cara Bastone: This revolves around phone calls between Vera, who is desperate to fix an issue with her business website before she attends an expo, and Cal, who answers when Vera contacts her website hosting service for customer support. Parts of the story are told through pure dialogue.

I had downloaded the Kindle sample some time ago, probably after I read Ready or Not, and it hadn’t grabbed me. While reading Promise Me Sunshine a few weeks earlier had certainly given me increased confidence in Bastone’s storytelling, I don’t remember finding the first few chapters of this any more compelling the second time round.

I think it was just more that I was in the mood for contemporary romance but not in the mood for making decisions and this was just there, in my Kindle app. Well, the sample was there, I did have to take steps to buy the rest of the book but somehow that still seemed like less effort than finding something else to read.

Not a very rational decision, considering that I thought the book would be vaguely okay at best. But I mention this because I actually ended up liking it! ( “But the best parts of the internet don’t usually trend. They’re the little moments. When you can find someone who feels the exact same way about something as you do. Or someone makes a joke that perfectly hits your funny bone. It can really make the world less lonely.” )

• Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone: The sequel to Call Me Maybe begins with Vera’s brother, Eliot, who is struggling with insomnia, sending a late-night message to the wrong number. Eliot has dyslexia, which possibly explains why he accidentally clicked on the wrong contact in his phone and definitely explains why the name he clicked on is an unidentifiable typo.

The recipient of his message knows who Eliot is but is reluctant to confirm her own identity. However, she’s a night owl and she is happy to have someone to talk to at this hour.

I thought the name of the game was going to be how to get out of this conversation with my pride still intact. But no. The name of the game is now chatting with a cute guy in the middle of the night without being the one to accidentally end the conversation first.

Like Call Me Maybe, parts of this are told through pure dialogue.

I enjoyed this story even more than the first one! I liked the mysteries – What led to Eliot’s insomnia? What is Jessie struggling with? Why doesn’t she want to tell him who she is? Also, this is a very sweet, very supportive romance.

• Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston: Joni, a successful songwriter, is visiting her family for the summer when her parents announce that they are planning on selling the family’s music hall business. She also discovers that she has a telepathic connection with another musician.

I was intrigued by the telepathy, and some of the bits about songwriting. I was also interested in seeing Joni dealing with her mother’s early-onset dementia diagnosis and her feelings about change. However, something about the North Carolina beach town setting didn’t feel quite real to me and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was – nor why it was bothering me. ( ‘Gigi darted her eyes between the two of us. I could just imagine the thoughts running through her head. The AO3 tags. I would never hear the end of this. I could already tell.’ )

starandrea

♥ mixed language

I was watching a Chinese vlogger open some mail and she was like, "If you can guess what's in this, leave a comment," and I immediately thought, "yi ben livre." Which is a combination of French and Chinese that I blame on Language Jones because youtube had just shown me a thumbnail of his video "Stop Mixing Languages." (And he speaks French, which I assume was the connection my brain made, since when I started learning Chinese it was ASL that I kept substituting with, probably because it was my most recent non-native working language.)

♥ language in dreams

The other funny thing about that is that it's a reminder of how differently we think, since I know a lot of people don't think in words and I definitely do. The other day I saw a discussion of dreaming in non-native languages, and several advanced language learners seemed convinced this phenomenon is either imaginary or "bogus" (not sure exactly what they meant by that), despite multilingual people assuring them it's real and normal. I remember my glee the first time I woke up and realized I'd been dreaming in Chinese. But I know a lot of people don't remember their dreams, either, so it must just be different brains with different experiences.

♥ AI face editing

Relatedly, I hadn't noticed any AI face editing until tonight, when I was watching my one of my favorite Taiwanese vloggers and suddenly thought, "wait, that's not a real face shape." (China has a relatively extreme "beauty filter" culture, and constant exposure to it may make people more likely to slide across the line from "very idealized" to "straight up anime" face without realizing it.) I googled AI face editing, and now I can't stop noticing people's teeth. I hope that passes quickly.

♥ AI face editing and faceblindness

Oh, but also, I found a helpful English video about a Chinese demonstration of AI face editing (the comments were definitely from non-Chinese viewers), and it included a demonstration of live AI face-swapping at the end. I'm faceblind, which I didn't think about at all until the face-swapping demonstration, because the face-editing was very clear to me. I could easily see the difference between the edited and unedited faces. But I could not see the difference between an original face and a face swap. It was amazing: the narrator would be like, "here's a Tom Cruise face swap" and I was like, "it's the same guy," and then the narrator would be like, "and here, obviously it's Scarlett Johannsen" and I was like, "what obviously; what are you talking about, it's obviously the same person."

So anyway, I don't know what that means, except that there's something different about AI face editing that's visible to me as a faceblind person in a way face-swapping isn't. (By comparison, I mean, I've never recognized editing without a comparison until tonight, and this wasn't "that face looks edited" or even "that face doesn't look real," but literally "that's not a normal human face shape." It looked perfectly real, it just wasn't biologically possible.)

♥ training with the pup

Finally, Daphne and I met with a dog trainer today, and as I told Marci, "I was impressed by him." She was like, "That's not a reaction you usually have to men." I know. So rare. (I often get along better with old men, and he says he's been training for 50 years, so maybe the pattern holds.) On the strength of our first meeting I agreed to a few "private" classes rather than a group class. No money was exchanged until the end of today's session, so I don't want to gush until we meet again, but he did everything right in the initial evaluation.

ysabetwordsmith

Current Mood: busy

This is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from

gs_silva. It also fills the "Ambiguous Situation" square in my 6-1-26 card for the Hazbin Hotel Fest. This poem belongs to the series Schrodinger's Heroes.

( Read more... )

starandrea

I have several pictures of the "coyotes," but none at the top of my camera roll, so I searched my photos for "wolf" (since that's what these coyotes look like to me). My photos turned up an actual Irish Wolfhound, whom I don't remember meeting at all, along with several pictures of Mimi running, which I found hilarious and charming.

Then I searched for "coyote," and lo, this picture came up.

( coyote and friends )

One of our neighbors has two cardboard "coyotes" that she puts by the river to keep geese from coming up on the banking. Apparently real coyotes move, so the geese are more convinced by this ruse if the coyotes are not in the same place every time they pass by.

The same neighbor also has a hammock, hence my explanation, "She says the rent to sit in the hammock is to move the coyotes, so I moved a coyote."

(I first encountered the coyotes years ago, at night, while I was out walking with Mimi by flashlight. I genuinely though we had come upon a live animal and I quickly scooped Mimi up and backed away. Mimi was completely unworried, which I admitted after the fact should have been a clue.)

sewagelag00n

Current Mood: back pain
Current Music: Fight Me Bite Me - Guitarheropianozero

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hannah

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: nothing now

Having just finished the rough draft of a Project Hail Mary fic, as is customary, I'm obligated to ask if anyone knows where I can find an icon. I've checked

fandom_icons and I'm sure there's another place or two someone else already knows about.

I've got to figure out a title, so thankfully, I'm not in a huge rush.

princessofgeeks

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princessofgeeks

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cornerofmadness

Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Penn & Teller's Fool Us

They say it never posted. I can't see that it posted. They waived the late fee and I paid it this time (and remembered to copy down the confirmation number which I usually do)

It was a day of me mostly working and feeling nauseous. I DID get the next scene in the slasher story done with a lot of help from FB friends (I was having a brain fart, couldn't think of all the skill sets you see at a renn fest)

Ah time for my Buffy verse Fannish 50 questions

Day 10: Least favourite episode

A couple years back Rolling Stone did their ranking for an anniversary. I'm not sure I agree with all of it.

right here on Rolling Stone

Some of my least favorites are Doublemeat Palace most because it made me want to punch the Watchers for not taking care of the Slayers (which frankly makes ZERO sense which is why I don't like it)

R.S. said this was the worst Where the Wild Things Are - I don't even remember it so I'll say yes.

Empty Places - the episode where Buffy is pushed out of her house. You already know how much I hate this one

Smashed - thanks for the sexual assault

Gingerbread - It was just a low point for Joyce

( all questions under here )

cyphomandra

How to fake it in society, KJ Charles
We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead
The husbands, Holly Gramazio
Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie (re-read)
The ark
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie
Till we have faces, CS Lewis

How to Fake it In Society, KJ Charles. Titus is a humble shopkeeper who makes paints for artists, who ends up marrying a wealthy woman on her deathbed in order to ensure that her relative (who may well have had something to do with there being a deathbed the first place) is disinherited; struggling with his sudden elevation, he is thrilled when Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de la Motte, a fashionable French escaped aristocrat with a Mysterious Past offers to help him make his way in society. But Nico is a con man barely a step ahead of some very nasty gangsters, and while he hoped to salvage himself with Titus’ money, his new feelings for Titus make it impossible to admit the truth… This is fine. It’s competently put together and I like the paint details but something about this pairing didn’t quite fire for me, the ending tipped a little too far into farce complete with one too many pantomime villains, and basically I think KJ likes con artists and scammers a lot more than I do.

We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead. Solid, painful documentation of the casualties of Canada’s approach to (men’s) hockey, from juniors to professionals, emphasising the gate-keepers who could (but don’t) change their approach. Pretty awful subject material, with all the sexual assault, misogyny, bullying, homophobia and hazing that you’d expect; it’s about culture, and about those who enforce it, but also those who chose to look away or not look deeper, and how much damage reverberates through the system.

The husbands, Holly Gramazio. Lauren, single, is met one night at the door of her flat by her (previously unknown) husband Michael. When he pops up to the attic to change a lightbulb, another husband comes back down; and, every time Lauren gets one up into the attic, she gets another one back, while with each new husband her own life and those of her close friends also change. It’s a great set-up and it rattles along (what if one of the husbands is awful? What if they move away from the flat?) for the first half before running off the rails a bit in the second. Lauren meets a husband to whom the same thing is happening (also, unlike Lauren, he’s about 50:50 whether he ends up with husbands or wives), which was great, but then things go wrong with a husband Lauren loses whom she wanted to keep, and in response Lauren does some pretty terrible things and it’s hard to know how terrible the author thinks they are. I see the author is a game designer, but the book is pitched as “how to choose when there are so many options” dating app rom com rather than “if I treat other people as NPCs how can I do this ethically, especially if I can just reset everything”, which is what I would have liked her to explore more.

Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie

Evil is Poirot staying in a sunny seaside house in Devon when the alluring Arlena, who is having an affair with another woman’s husband, gets herself strangled, and Sittaford is a standalone murder in a snowstorm that took place at the exact time as a group of related people were having a seance and the table spelled out MURDER and the name of the victim. I liked the ideas behind the solution of Evil while not finding them entirely convincing; Sittaford is solider in that respect, but neither are top-tier.

The ark, Haruo Yuki (trans. Jim Rion, who does the Uketsu books). A group of friends exploring the wilderness find a strange abandoned bunker; when they go down into it, an earthquake traps them. The only way out would require one of them to stay behind and face certain death. Helpfully, someone then commits murder; if they can work out who it was, they can force that person to stay behind, although this assumes a) they cooperate and b) whoever it is stops killing more people…

I did like the atmosphere in this, although it could have done with more pace and a lot less “we’re being murdered so let’s split up and go to places individually”. The characters aren’t that well-developed, but there is at least depth to some of them, and the final twist is satisfyingly dark.

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis One of those books I’ve always meant to read but never got around to before (I think I first read about it in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which means it’s been at least 30 years of good intentions. The Cupid and Psyche myth, retold from Orual’s (Psyche’s older half-sister) point of view, with and gosh Orual is a fascinating protagonist, flawed and believable, and a product of her society even when she breaks from it (I note that Joy Davidman was at the very least the first reader on this and at most a co-author). The way Orual’s realisation of how her (selfish) love for others has hurt them reverberates.

highlander_ii posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: they've got ears
Fandom: no fandom
Rating: G
Content notes: None apply
Summary: icons of mules and their big ears, made from images found on the interwebs

( they've got ears )

enchanted_jae posting in

dove_drabbles

Hello everyone; welcome to the comm! Here is the prompt for July:

Prompt # 153: Small steps can still walk miles
Use the phrase itself, or simply convey the meaning. I'm not sure what it means, myself, but let's have fun with it!

How it Works:
-Prompts will come from the messages on the inside of the wrappers of chocolate Dove candies.
-Prompts will be posted at the beginning of each month.
-You may use the prompt as a direct quote, a phrase, or simply convey it somehow in your creation.
-You're free to write/draw any fandom, pairing, threesome, gen fic, etc.
-Fic of all length, art, drabbles, drawbles, poetry, etc, are all welcome.
-Combine the prompt with other challenges, etc if you can.
-Please crosspost your entry to the community. (You may of course post to your journal and simply link back when you post to the community.)
-You have until the last day of the month to submit an entry.
-If you wish, you can also post on the ao3 collection.

Posting header for LJ/DW.

Anyone can join in. Please submit your drabble/fic/art to the community by the end of the month.

word_never_said posting in

fandom10in30

Current Music: youtube - old timey murder

Preview:

10 Widow's Bay & My Lady Jane

the rest are here @

stillpermanentt

musesfool

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Mets vs Royals on tv

I meant to post last night but I could barely keep my eyes open so I went to bed early (and missed a super rare Mets comeback in Atlanta!) and slept for 10 glorious hours! I felt great at work today, and got some stuff done, and made some suggestions about the September board meeting agenda that I am sure the CEO and the Chair will not like, but they wanted to get radical and also not overrun the meeting time by 45 minutes again, and I offered a good way to do it to my boss. We'll see if anyone bites.

I am off tomorrow for the dentist - it should just be a cleaning (though I am braced to hear I need yet another crown) but I am always so tired when it's over. And my team meeting on Tuesday got cancelled so I am tempted to take next Tuesday off since I'm already off Wednesday (my birthday), Thursday, and Friday of next week. My boss was like, sure! but I'm still thinking about it.

I thought I had something else to post about but I can't remember... oh right, I finally watched Project Hail Mary the other night. I enjoyed it but it was too long. And there was not enough Eva Stratt, who was the best thing in the movie.

*

linky

Current Mood: tired

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ysabetwordsmith

Current Mood: busy

... is repeating itself. This post compares Washington, D.C. with occupied Berlin from the perspective of someone who's seen both.

Never forget.

muccamukk

(I was fucking around on my phone for the last few hours, while Kaylee slept on her blanket. The second I got my laptop out, Kaylee came over and started to purr aggressively next to me. You can't be on my lap right now, baby.)

These are probably going to be brief, as my memory isn't that strong six months later.

Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim "Joe" Fortes by Ruby Smith Díaz
(Local author, read before she gave a talk for Black History Month.)

Short biography and a poem about a Caribbean Black man working as a lifeguard in Vancouver, BC, in the early 20th century. The records of Serafim Fortes are pretty slight, and almost all from the perspective of white people—who treated him as a sort of mascot, and talked about how great he was despite his race—so Smith Díaz is mostly reading against the grain of the historical record, and speculating lot. I normally do not like history books that include this much speculation, however, Smith Díaz is very clear about when and why she's filling in ideas, and I think it works in this context. It introduced me to Marie-Claire Graham's concept of "speculative archiving" as a way of dealing with gaps in the record created by historical violence, which this book is more or less an example of. I appreciated that Smith Díaz did not shy away from or excuse records of Fortes behaving poorly. Very much worth a read as a local history, and as an example of navigating a fragmented and racist archive.

Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe, narrated by Nneka Okoye
(Canada Reads Longlist, which I wish had been on the shortlist.)

A coming of age novel about a young woman in western Uganda, who discovers that her beloved older sister is a lesbian. One's reaction to that premise might be, "Oh no!" but this novel was not a tragedy about queer bashing, though the setting and my knowledge of Ugandan politics made it a tense read.

(I also felt that my ((at this point rather hazy)) knowledge of Ugandan geography, culture and food helped me a lot, including having been in the same places described in the book. There's a lot of cultural detail and non-English terms dropped in without explanation, so remembering what most things were saved me a lot of looking stuff up.)

But most of the novel is about a teenager trying to figure out both the world and herself, in a family with a lot of internal conflict and pressures. There's a few cases of sixteen-year-olds making poor choices, but for the most part the novel offers its characters a lot of grace. It's about discovering the world can be a lot bigger than you're told it is, and offering and receiving second chances. Really loved this one.

Witch King by Martha Wells, narrated by Eric Mok
(Reread before getting into the new one.)

I'm really glad I reread this, as I initially rushed through it to find out what happened, and as a result didn't remember several key plot points, which turned out to be essential to the second novel. There are a lot of moving parts!

Basically still love everyone in this band, and appreciate getting a novel about decentralising power, rather than building empires.

Queen Demon by Martha Wells, narrated by Eric Mok
Really enjoyed this one, also, though it ends in a more obvious cliffhanger than the first one, which stands more or less on its own.

Mostly just like the characters and enjoy spending time with them. It's again nice to see people struggling with the work of consensus building, interspersed with battle scenes, lol. I like Kai slowly coming out of his shell in the first timeline, and how much the characters have changed over the centuries between the flashbacks and present day. It really nicely both shows the long-range consequences, and builds up tension as the plots weave towards each other. Bit bummed out by some of the casualties along the way.

I hope we get the next one soon!

lucymonster

There is a story about a minister in Scotland in the eighteenth century who survived in his parish for ten years on a repertoire of four sermons. When some of his congregation asked whether they might have more variety he replied: ‘My friends, my sermons are intended to do you good. When I see that you practise what I have been preaching for so many years, then I will treat you to something different.’
~ Peter Cameron, Necessary Heresies

I’m sharing this quote mostly because it’s hilarious, but also because it makes a good point. I know I, at least, have an awful tendency to collect Christian teachings the way I collect books: greedily, with great self-satisfaction, at far too rapid a pace for me to ever put most of them to their intended use. How much more profitable it would be, and how much less fun, to really lock in and master what I’ve already received before reaching for the next theological ladder-rung!

With that said, here's some recent church-adjacent reading:

( Three books under the cut )

network

Ch01, page 84

yonder

like a warm hug

no, "no subject" is accurate; accept

Poem: "Its Weirdness Is Evident Without Comparison"

move the coyotes

Dooming a bit about misogyny.

Seventh of the Seventh.

Heated Rivalry missing scene pondering

Heated Rivalry rec

No clue about electricity

Books read, June

no fandom : icons : they've got ears

July Prompt

round 65: text

thirty pillows pilfered

Got tagged in a meme!

History

Book Review Backlog: Part I (January to March)

Reading Wednesday, for once

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