Reading

Entry tags:

to do

Monthly Roundup Returns

sunshine_revival's first challenge is goals/plans for the month, just in time for me to actually post my monthly plans roundup. (A couple of days late, because hot.)

So here goes:

( June )

July's plans are to survive being too fucking hot.

( July )

There is another part to the challenge but I'll worry about that later, if at all.

Entry tags:

review

Blight (Sleep of Reason, volume 2) by Rachel A. Rosen

Director of the nation formerly known as Canada Quinn Atherton is determined to deliver much mass murder as it takes to achieve peace, order, good government. Why do so many ingrates object?

Blight(Sleep of Reason, volume 2) by Rachel A. Rosen

Current Mood: disappointed

One from the vaults

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

We're hiding here inside a dream and all our doubts are now destroyed

Last day of work for the week. Yesterday we put up the second half of our pantry unit, which is shelves. I'm slowly starting to move things over there, and figuring out where everything needs to go. I love feeling organized and having my counter space.

CONfab is virtual this year, and Programming submissions are open!!. If you have a panel you want to see or that you want to run, go put it in! I had a lot of fun with the con last year, and I'll almost certainly be DMing a one shot at some point during the weekend!

I saw an info graphic that July 2 is the halfway point of 2025. Which means that today we're closer to 2050 than 2000. I dried up like the crypt keeper and felt ancient for a while.

Last night, we had hot pot. I bought a hot pot container that has two compartments, and then went on Weee! and bough the meats to cook. It's super fun, and I highly recommend doing it. Grab a few sauces and go for it. Fair warning, wear a shirt you don't like, because shit will get dropped on it.

Then, we had a game, Blades in the Dark, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm tying in a little bit of backstory, which is alway fun. Tomorrow we have Frostmaiden, which will also be cool.

Sunday, I'm beginning a new game, which is always nervewracking. It's fully homebrew which is doubly nervewracking. I think it'll go well, but I always worry.

My new clothes for next week should come on Monday, but of course, the blazer that I wasn't even sure I wanted is coming today. The skirts and blouse are coming on Monday.

Okay, time to go forth and get myself together. Everyone have an amazing Thursday!

Current Mood: tired

Entry tags:

Miscellaneous

The number of times recently when I was reading the cover copy summary of a fantasy book and get interested in the plot... and then it gets to the part about the protagonist's attraction to so-and-so and I realize it's a romantasy and put it down... way too many. And it's almost always a dark, illicit, or unwanted attraction.

+++

My left ankle is doing well! It barely hurts. I left off the compression/support sleeve altogether today because it was making the top of my foot hurt and I was fine. I'm looking around and walking much more carefully and with more awareness though.

+++

I tried the first episode of season 1 of Peacemaker and bounced off it hard. I didn't even make it all the way through the first half. Didn't like the characters, didn't like the tone, it didn't make me care.

+++

My current WIPs are Encanto. No idea if anybody here is reading my Encanto fics, but it's what I'm doing.

Entry tags:

Films watched Matariki weekend

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Part 1 of my weekend of revenge!! Although the film spent quite a long time pre-revenge, which was a little bit frustrating to me. I’m not watching a Count of Monte Cristo adaptation for Dantès’ pre-Count life.

( Read more... )

Ballerina (2025)

Revenge part 2, the John Wick spinoff. I’ve only seen the first and last John Wick movies, so some of the world building stuff may have gone over my head.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: "Jonestown" by Concrete Blonde

Entry tags:

Metal from Heaven by August Clarke

This book fought me. There were so many times I nearly put it down for good, but some online reviews said it got much better at about 50% of the way through so I slogged on. It does pull off something pretty cool at the end, enough for me to raise the rating from "did not like it" to "it's okay" but not enough for me to rate it higher or feel like the effort to get there was entirely worth it.

There are some great scenes! Punctuated by long stretches where I was so bored. How could a book about a lesbian highwaywoman seeking revenge on the industrialist who had her family and friends murdered when she was a child--only she survived the massacre--have boring stretches? And yet.

The writing is florid and sometimes nearly blurry. Metal from Heaven's main viewpoint character often sees the world somewhat off because she's deeply allergic to ichorite, a metal that she was exposed to a lot at the foundry she and her family had worked at that is now being laced into everything. When close to it or in contact with it, it hurts her body in many ways as well as overlays a nearly hallucinogenic slant to everything she sees. ( spoiler )

It might've been nice having more POVs than just hers.

This book throws a lot of superfluous details at you... then reveals much later on that not all of it was superfluous. Some transitions were abrupt and awkward. There are so many names in this--people, places, religions--that it can be hard to keep track of who is who and what is what, so an appendix would've been nice.

Some of the twists were very clever, but one major one absolutely failed at my suspension of disbelief. I was not able to go along with it.

Weather's cooled down a bit, that's nice

Moonpie's foot looks better, we didn't end up having to take her for an x-ray at all.

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

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

doctor who

(no subject)

Couldn't sleep so I watched two more Doctor Who.
Cold War had me staring into space for a while afterwards because it turns out the idea of nuclear war is still a teensy tiny bit bothersome. I wasn't entirely impressed by the specifics though.
Hide was proper scary. I was watching it at four in the morning on a no sleep night so I was noticing it was proper scary and I maybe probably hadn't scheduled that well. But it is Doctor Who so it is family television scary, where you hide behind the sofa *but* it makes it okay again by the end. So it stuck the landing very well. I was pleased happy and not scared by the time it was time to turn the tele off.
I realised though that the technique it used, finally giving us a good look at them and a happy enough ending, was quite a lot of what I found unimpressive in Cold War. I disliked their design for the insides of the suit, so I felt it detracted from the episode. But pulling the scary away and showing us the person is the actual proper point of both of those. So I am enlightened.

Not exactly sleepy still but I'll have another go.

Entry tags:

Purrcy; Pride

I finished taking the laundry out of this basket & put it down on its side for Purrcy investigation. It was worth snooping in, but not really good for long-term use, he found.

What's that in the sky? he wondered, after several days of rain & thunder-growler attacks.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands in a brown cloth laundry bin lying on its side. He peers out and up at the sunlight coming from the skylight above, his whiskers looking long but rather doubtful.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands in a brown cloth laundry bin lying on its side. He peers out and up at the sunlight coming from the skylight above, his whiskers looking long but rather doubtful.

My back continues to be better, while not being anything like *all* better. Prednisone has the reputation of being Side Effects City, my biggest ones so far are dry mouth making my voice all scratchy, and a certain amount of ADHD/mania type behavior, trouble settling & sleeping. Only 3 more days of tapering to go, though.

Amid all The Horrors ramping up & up, here's something that's given me active joy in the past couple of days: Sir Ian McKellan joining Scissor Sisters onstage at Glastonbury Festival:

Watch on YouTube

My god, he's still got that full Royal Shakespeare voice.

It makes me cry a bit with joy at the end there, seeing Sir Ian being able to lead his people in a public celebration of being out & proud. And to see an old man being *venerated*, for once, admired for achievements but in this case also as a symbol of what people like those in the audience can have with age: a *full* life, a *long* life, a life with everything in it, despite what they may have been told. You don't have to be young to be queer, it's not a phase, it's part of a complete human life.

Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Today was kind of a long day but I did get stuff done.

2. Just one more day of work this week and then three day weekend!

3. Finished another puzzle today. This is from the multi-puzzle box of Disney 70th anniversary puzzles. I really love this design, and they've got a fair bit of merch using it, too, but sadly not anything I actually need (and not even much that I particularly want).

4. Chloe loves lying on Carla's bed by the window.

Entry tags:

neil gaiman allegations

Not a GREAT week when it comes to ending sexual violence.

The whole Diddy thing. It doesn't matter how much proof there is.

Brad Pitt, who is known to have struck his wife and his children then perpetuated lawfare on them for years to the point where several of his kids no longer want contact with him, has the number one movie right now. Best opening weekend of his career. Most of the coverage doesn't even mention the violence.

On the anniversary of Tortoise Media publishing allegations of rape and sexual assault against Neil Gaiman, Netflix is dropping season two of The Sandman. Meanwhile, Gaiman is forcing one of his victims into arbitration. Not because she's libling him, but because she broke an NDA. Everything's gone very quiet, which I assume is what he wanted.

Some thoughts from smarter people:

Rebecca Solnit: Cynicism Is the Enemy of Action.

Tarana Burke: Tarana Burke doesn’t define #MeToo’s success by society’s failure.

Some people want to judge the movement on specific outcomes, so when a case is overturned, Burke said, “people are like, ‘Oh the #MeToo movement has failed.’” Instead, she said, such outcomes are proof of the difficulty of the work.

“It’s not about the failure of the movement; it’s the failure of the systems,” Burke explained. “These systems are not designed to help survivors, they’re not designed to give us justice, they’re not designed to end sexual violence.”

“When we bind ourselves to the outcomes of these cases, we are constantly up and down with our disappointment, our highs and lows,” Burke continued. “What they tell us is just how much work we need to change the laws and the policies but most importantly, to change the culture that creates the people who commit, who perpetrate acts of harm.”

My alt-Mummy film

The inspiration being the 1999 Mummy movie is not without problematic elements.

Imagine an Egyptian film company wanting to make a movie about idiots waking a horror in Canada that only the Egyptian lead can resolve.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Thanks to a donation from

fuzzyred, you can now read the rest of "In the Heart of the Hidden Garden." Lawrence gives Stan a tour of two more buildings and two more gardens -- and then explains why.

Entry tags:

peter wimsey

Wimsey Quote Database

The hardest thing about writing Peter Wimsey fanfic is the quotes. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of their era (and the literature that was considered classic/important in that era), and quote it often.

Today I posted on the Gaud Squad Discord that it would be awesome if we had a searchable database of the literature and poetry that they knew or could reasonably be expected to know, searchable by keyword and theme, so that one could look things up easily. And that I would be willing to do the data entry, but had not the technical skills to set it up.
supertailz responded by setting up a Notion instance and is noodling around with the technical aspects of it, so it looks like this is happening!

The easy part is getting the literature that Peter and Harriet quote added--all I have to do is read through the books (no hardship there!) and source the quotations. Although I know there are some annotated versions floating around, and if anyone has a copy of the annotations, that would be lovely.

The hard part is getting the right mix of things that Peter and Harriet would have known. Because what is considered "classic literature" changes over time. Some things rise in acclaim, some things fall out of favor. What would be really handy is a curriculum for Eton ca. 1900 and for Oxford ca. 1910, but so far I haven't found anything. Does anybody know how to search "what literary works were considered classics in 1920"? Or have a good list of where to start?

Current Mood: exanimate
Current Music: nothing now

Second day in.

Thinking it'd look more professional, I went with a messenger bag instead of a backpack today. As professional as it may have looked, I'm going to go back to the backpack. So much easier for so many things on so many levels, not the least of which is being able to ride a bike. Yes, I know bike messengers do it all the time. No, I'm not a professional bike messenger, and I'm unwilling to try. Especially if I'm already wearing a nice dress.

There wasn't much time to read at work, mostly because I'd been given an actual task to do: sorting through patient folders and setting aside old records to discard. Not as much fun as it'd have been if I'd had an MP3 player with me, and still satisfying to see the piles start to rise, and space in the drawers start to emerge. Where there's space in a drawer, there's objects to be discovered, and found my second office perk. A stain remover stick's not much, but it's still something I could take home with me. The first thing is a large can of cold brew coffee sitting in my fridge, waiting for a morning I need a jolt beyond all meaning.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Inappropriate John Williams

Entry tags:

movie: the old guard

2 Old 2 Guard

Tl;dr: I liked it a lot.

( Spoilers )

Entry tags:

wednesday reads and things

What I've recently finished reading:

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).

What I'm reading now:

My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.

What I recently finished watching:

American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.

I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.

What I'm about to start watching:

Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.

What I'm playing now:

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.

Current Mood: happy

Sekrit msg

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Entry tags:

summer sleepaway camp fundraiser

Summer Sleepaway Camp Fundraising Update

Just to keep everyone in touch with what's going on with our yearly fundraiser, we're getting close! Our yearly goal is to raise at least $2,000 so that we can get through the next year, and as of 3pm Pacific Time today, we've raised $1,792.16 - almost 90% of our goal!

If you can help get us to our goal, or just need more information about the fundraiser, including the cool design on either a sticker or t-shirt you get for donating, you can click here for all the details. And if you're so inclined, you can simply use PayPal to send a donation to donations@squidge.org.

Thank you for being part of our little space on the Internet!