happy new year

[melannen]

We are back from a covid-careful visit to Alabama to see stellar_dust and her cat but I'm still scared to take the rapid test that's right next to me because I've had a little bit of a sore throat lately, what if I caught it anyway? (When I inevitably get omicron I want it to be sometime when I can blame it on work, please.) Happy 2022, everyone.

And I am proved correct in my prediction that I would continue to forget how to post regularly after my 100 days were up! Maybe I will attempt snowflake_challenge this year? Maybe I will actually do it?

Also I have exactly 100 comic trades shelved beside my bed, none of which I have read, so I could attempt a read-one-a-day-and-post-about-it thing, free up some shelf space and cognitive overhead and to-read list. They are all review copies that came from a friend who worked at Diamond and was literally avalanched with review copies; she no longer works there post-Covid layoffs so I actually have a chance of getting caught up on comics now! Maybe after Snowflake.

My New Year's resolution is to get a cat, which entails getting the apartment ready for a cat, and also choosing a cat to get and making a commitment. Maybe if I delay long enough one will choose me, that's how it's always worked before (also I really don't want to go tour shelters right now.) (I want one who can be like my sister's cat and clear executive function logjams by screaming at me until I get up and do stuff, but I don't know how to find that. Also one that cuddles and will walk on a leash.)

I made my Goodreads reading challenge by scrambling to add my Yuletide reading this morning! 52 books. The last few years I've started with a low number, been well over it by June, doubled it, and then read basically no books in the back half of the year, which also happened this year, although I think there were several re-reads and small books that didn't get counted, so I'm probably more comfortably over than I looked. (I really wish Goodreads handled rereads better. And reads of different editions of the same book! I read three different editions of my Yuletide canon and I still don't think I managed to get that in GR right, though at least it counted it for the challenge.) I put in 100 for next year while eyeing that shelf of trades, we'll see.

The AO3 download-your-history app has been down since November. :( I understand wanking to take it down around the period when everybody will be wanting their year-end stats, but I hope it comes back! Or somebody makes a new one! Not that it would tell me much this year, because the recs project would definitely mess up the stats. I added 132 pages to my AO3 history this year though! That's 2639 fic pages loaded this year, or an average of 7 a day.

The only fic I wrote this year was my yuletide fic. I wish I'd managed to write more on it - in particular you will just have to imagine Part 2, A Discourse on Translation, in which A. Square meets some Lines in the asylum who are so bent they are practically Polygons and various people realize they can rotate themselves through the third dimension for purposes of destroying gender essentialism, and also escaping the asylum. But writing about inverted Victorian geometry was great fun! And primeideal left a nice comment so I must not have messed up the maths too bad even if I worked too late to get a maths beta! (most of my knowledge of 4+ dimensional geometry can be credited to an 8 AM multivariable calculus course my freshman year of college, in which I learned that the way to see into the fourth dimension is to repeatedly fall asleep in your 8 AM multivariable calculus class, so this fic is dedicated to my recip and to the prof who though it was a great idea to schedule advanced freshman math at 8 am.) (Anything I did get wrong is due to A. Square not being up on the latest geometrical theory, due to being trapped in an asylum.)

A Discourse on Inversion Among The Inhabitants of Flatland (3164 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: The King of Pointland/A. Square
Characters: A. Square, The King of Pointland
Additional Tags: Solitary Confinement, Geometry, Solipsism, Dreams, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Worldbuilding, extremely nonhumanoid sex, Xeno, polygonal sex, Victorian Attitudes, Canon Nonbinary Character, it/its pronouns, sexual inversion, geometric inversion, a center point inverted to the point at infinity, hot vertex-on-vertex action, Sexuality Crisis, Non-Euclidean Geometry, sort of vore but not really it's complicated
Summary:

I should count myself a King of Infinite Space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Comments

[china_shop]

Happy New Year!

[redbird]

I like the fic, and the epigraph really fits.

[stellar_dust]

Do your test so I’ll know if I need to go buy one D:

[jesse_the_k]

You are the spirit of Yuletide present!

[rushthatspeaks]

I understand wanking to take it down

This is an incredibly endearing and probably accurate typo.

in which I learned that the way to see into the fourth dimension is to repeatedly fall asleep in your 8 AM multivariable calculus class

I mean I can't think of a better way to do it!

[umadoshi]

My New Year's resolution is to get a cat

Can there be a better resolution? I think not. Good luck with your quest!

[primeideal]

Aww hahaha I'm flattered by that! I saw the tags and was like..."this could be terrible issue fic but more likely it could be phenomenal math porn, let's check it out," and was not disappointed :D :D And that is an excellent way to see into the fourth dimension.

[melannen]

I don't have Covid yet!

[melannen]

Happy New Year!

[melannen]

It's so perfect for the Point that I was astonished to discover it wasn't a canon epigraph.

[melannen]

I only realized that Flatland was about a Victorian gentleman who is visited by three spirits on the eve of the holiday when it was too late to do anything with it. (Also I am amazed that I have never seen that pointed out before! Even in the annotated edition I read this fall!)

[melannen]

Oh shoot I thought I'd fixed that. *facepalm* Oh well, it stays now.

I could not hang onto it much after waking, any more that A. Square, but at least I know I've done it!

[melannen]

I am glad I lived up to the tags! :D :D

(Flatland is itself terrible issue fic, with a surprising amount of weird porn for what it is, so really I wsa spoiled for choice.)

[melannen]

I hope one finds me!

[umadoshi]

I hope one finds me!

Being the goal of a cat's quest is equally excellent!

[superborb]

Tangential q: are the annotations in the annotated edition worth searching it out?

[lannamichaels]

Best of luck on the cat!

[melannen]

Well, bearing in mind that I practically grew up on Gardner's Alice, and thus my standards for annotated editions of Victorian mathematical fancies are extremely high: ehhhh. He's clearly more interested in the mathematics than the historical & social stuff, which is fine! But Abbott actually explains the maths pretty well himself, plus I have a reasonably good layman's understanding of geometry, so I didn't really get much out of those. There's some really general stuff about Victorian society but not really more than anyone with a fair experience of Victorian fiction would already know. So, like, for the bit where A. Square gets his original visit from a Spirit from Outside the World on New Year's Eve, I would have liked an annotation about the tradition of Victorian Christmas ghost stories, and what it means about this Christian clergyman creating a universe that is completely nontheistic thus that there's not even a not at hit at Christmas, and, like, New Year's Eve celebrations in the time this was written, and maybe some parallels with other visits from Spirits in texts Abbot might have known, and so on? Instead there's a very short note about how the Long Holiday is probably a reference to the term schedule at the school where Abbot taught and that's it.

The Chromatistes digression by itself could have had many pages of annotations about historical parallels and Classicism and color printing and suffragism and the history of perspective and trompe l'oeil in art and how all that lined up with Abbott's curriculum in the school and who knows what, and he passes it off with about a half a paragraph about Victorian art theory that was so boring I don't even remember what it said; he was clearly uninterested in Chromatistes because it wasn't about math.

Similarly the aural sex in Lineland got literally nothing (not even a note about how sound would propagate in one dimension and whether Abbott would have been aware of that! Or like something about the history of the speed of sound, which I guess wasn't pure maths so he wasn't interested.)

The intro was pretty good for a general biographical overview of Abbott & a publication history of the text, and I did get a lot out of the epilogue which went into more detail on four-dimensional maths from a modern POV. If you're already pretty good on basic geometry, Euclidean and otherwise, and you can navigate a Victorian social text mostly on your own, I think the main thing you'll get out of the annotations is a lot of interesting history of geometry both before and after Abbott, which didn't really need to be annotations to Flatland, and references to other published Flatland fic (including Stewart's own) which was fine. But I think if you look up Gardner's "Wonders of a Planiverse" (free on archive.org) and Rudy Rucker's The Fourth Dimension you will have covered most of the interesting parts of that better.

If I was giving Flatland to someone who wasn't into either math history or Victoriana, the annotated edition might be worth it, but I'm not sure why I would.

[melannen]

I hope! Today I should be working on prepping the space where a litter box will go, but I am not!

[superborb]

Thanks! Yeah, doesn't seem worth it then (though I did just check out Gardner's Alice, which seems much more interesting!)

[sarken]

Maybe if I delay long enough one will choose me, that's how it's always worked before (also I really don't want to go tour shelters right now.)

fwiw, the last cat I adopted from a shelter (rather than scooping out of my backyard), I picked out entirely online using Petfinder. I didn't play with him or hug him or anything until I let him out of the carrier at home, and it was definitely one of the best decisions I ever made.

[melannen]

I do recommend Gardner's Annotated Alice! Not only is it super interesting, not only will it both teach you a lot of stuff and make you see the Alice stories a whole new way, it also completely changed the way I look at texts in general? Because it pulls out *everything* and so you see how much of the text you're missing by not getting all the references and parallels that would have been obvious to Carroll's original audience, both the ones where you can tell you're missing something and the ones where you can't, but it's also the references that would have been obvious only to Carroll, and also the stuff that Carroll might not have realized he was doing but sing out to later audiences, and you realize that while not every text is an Alice all those layers are there in all of them and you can only start to see what you don't see.

(Martin Gardner is worth a rec in general if you like things about the intersection of math and culture and science and society, though! The essay collection I linked is a good start.)

[melannen]

Oh, good to know! I do realize that any cat I get will be, definitionally, the Best Cat, but I still kind of want to dither over it and hope one turns up in my backyard instead.

[thedarlingone]

"sort of vore but not really it's complicated"

Being friends with people who write fics that need tags like this is probably one of the other reasons I'm so adamantly against banning specific kinks in fannish spaces (besides, you know, the main one, i.e. that censorship is always used by the powerful against the marginalized). My newest fandom is inhabited by a terrifying number of Tumblr teenagers who are all about the "do not interact if you support xyz!" and it's... very irritating. Nice to wander back to the land of, if not the sane, at least the complicatedly nonhuman for a bit ^_^

[melannen]

Yeah, like, if I could easily define whether this thing fits your categories or not, what would be the fun of writing it? :D