rikibeth | Reading

Colossal Biosciences is planning to bring back the giant moa, a 3m (10 foot) tall flightless bird that went extinct around 600 years ago, shortly after humans arrived in New Zealand. Peter Jackson is one of the major investors. Considering the difficulties the Australians had when dealing with emus, which are only 2/3 the size of the great moa, they really need to consider that there was probably very good reason that the early New Zealanders wiped them out.

pauraque

In this top-down sci-fi RPG, you play as Jake Stone, a bounty hunter in a distant galaxy. In the course of your regularly scheduled bounty hunting, you discover a conspiracy to suppress hyperdrive technology and prevent your people and their nearby enemies the Rigians from exploring beyond the local star systems. You and you alone (for some reason) must figure out who is trying to keep you locked in together and how you can escape.

Jake converses with an alien who says he is there to evaluate his peoples technology

Jake converses with an alien who says he is there to evaluate his peoples technology

I have intense nostalgia for one specific aspect of this game. Interestingly, in retrospect I think it is probably also the worst aspect of this game.

( Namely: in space everything is extremely far apart. )

Solar Winds is not commercially available, which is slightly surprising given the developer's later high-profile work. But if you are so inclined, you can play part one and part two in your browser. I've read that the game was heavily inspired by Star Control II, which I haven't played, but I would be interested to check it out and compare.

brithistorian

I love YouTube Music — it's a great streaming system and gives me access to music that I could only have dreamed of when I was younger. But there's one thing about it — a small thing really, but still big enough that it bothers me: When you have a playlist, it should be a trivial thing for the software to add up the running times of all the songs in the playlist and give you a runtime for the playlist, and this works for shorter playlists, but once a playlist reaches 5 hours or more in length, the program gets lazy and anything over 5 hours is either "5+ hours" or "5 hours [XX] minutes," where [XX] isn't the actual number of minutes past 5 hours, instead the point after 5 hours where the software got lazy and decided to stop adding. Not a deal killer, not even that big of a deal, really, but it's annoying.

delphi

Love Letter from the Afterlife
-Andrea Gibson (August 13, 1975 - July 14, 2025)

delphi

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

pauraque

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.

Birds always make me smile, so let's do a bird list! To narrow it down a bit, I'll talk about a few of the birds I only got to know after I left San Francisco and moved to New England. The order is going to be arbitrary because of course all birds are equally fantastic, but I'll play along with the top 10 theme.

( Top Ten New England Birds [photo heavy] )

brithistorian

Two days ago, Twice and Blackpink both had comebacks on the same day: Twice's "This is for" and Blackpink's "뛰어(JUMP)" (links go to the videos, so as not to spam your feed with two embedded videos).

Blackpink's song is a 1-song single, per YG's strategy of keeping Blinks starved for new music from Blackpink, while Twice's song is part of a 14-song album, keeping with JYP's strategy of giving Once as much music as they could possibly want from Twice. I prefer the JYP strategy — at first I was a bigger fan of Blackpink than of Twice, but eventually I got tired of waiting for new songs from Blackpink.

Two interesting things I noticed:

Twice Jeongyeon has had difficulty meeting the ridiculous weight standards imposed on K-pop idols (i.e. still not fat by any measure), so in recent comebacks Twice's stylists have started dressing everyone but Jeongyeon in midriff-baring tops. I don't know if this was done at the company's request or at Jeongyeon's, but they did it again this time.
Blackpink's song actually includes the English lyric "Are you not entertained?"

brithistorian

I've got an idea about the plotting one of my fics, but I'm not sure if the idea I've got right now is the right thing. So. . . if any of you have read my fic "Turning of the Year" — or if you feel like reading it right now — and you'd like to give your input on the future course of the story (at the risk of possibly getting spoiled), send me a message.

konsectatrix

Mr. Mouse's birthday week is always chaotic. His actual birthday involved racing violent thunderstorms up the Garden State Pkwy to get home ahead of the possible tornado.

I may have enjoyed that adventure a *bit* more than he did.

His friends demanded that he go out to dinner with them the next day. Mr. Mouse asked them to reconsider, it had already been a strange enough day at work that his coworkers told him to Go Away and take his chaos with him. He was very irritated that he couldn't say it wasn't his chaos, it was his mother's.

His friends insisted, though, and eventually came over to kidnap him. I heard their car on the gravel drive as it came and went.

( this was not the best idea ever )

Current Mood: good
Current Music: fit for an autopsy: far from heaven

pauraque

In this first book of a hard SF trilogy, nanomaterials expert Wang Miao is recruited to help investigate the suicides of several prominent scientists. His inquiries lead him to a strange VR video game called Three Body, in which the player is challenged to solve the mystery of why the game's simulated world keeps falling victim to unpredictable changes in climate that cause its civilizations to inevitably collapse. Interwoven with the book's near-future narrative is a story of the past, in which an astrophysicist who lost everything in Mao's Cultural Revolution is assigned to a secret military base that she comes to realize is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. These two seemingly unrelated threads come together to reveal a multilayered conspiracy of world-ending stakes.

I had this on my TBR list for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it was about, and I think that worked out well for my experience of it. I never knew where it was going to go next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Liu has a flair for creating epic set pieces of jaw-dropping cinematic scope that nonetheless follow naturally from the speculative science. I consumed a lot of popular science media in the 2000s, specifically, so for me the science in this book felt... oddly nostalgic? Not that it's obsolete, necessarily, but the particular preoccupations of that era and what was cutting-edge are strongly represented here. It made me want to go read a Brian Greene book.

The translation by Ken Liu reads nicely and I appreciated the informative but not excessive footnotes helping with some points about Chinese culture and history. I love that they let him write an afterword about the translation process!

The book is definitely more interested in ideas than people, and it's particularly weak on female characters. I was not entirely surprised to hear that the Netflix adaptation makes some of the male characters women, including Wang Miao. (I guess it also changes the nationality of a lot of characters, which makes less sense to me since the Chinese setting seems crucial to the book's themes, but I haven't actually watched the adaptation so it's not for me to say how well it works.)

I do plan to continue with the trilogy, though I have a suspicion that it might turn out to be too pessimistic in its outlook on the future for my taste? But I guess it depends on where the story ends up. My library hold on the second book just came in.

delphi

Fandom 50 #23

Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia

Description:

Two full-colour images of Daisuke and Monty, one in the present and one in flashback to their younger days. The first is fully saturated and features the two walking close together with Monty in the lead. Daisuke's hat is tipped forward over his eyes as he looks down with a faint smile and puts away his flask. Monty is watching him over his shoulder, likewise smiling and seemingly mid-conversation with him. Above them, larger and more faded out, is a memory of them sitting together decades ago, Daisuke speaking while Monty watches him with soft-eyed attention.

( Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.

I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.

gentlyepigrams

Books
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD (3rd edition), by Susan C. Pinsky. I don't have ADHD but chronic illness has given me some of the same management issues, and I'm pretty sure spouse has his share as well. This is the third edition; I'd previously read the second edition, and there's some additional useful information in it. Specifically there's more up-to-date suggestions for keeping your online life organized. I think I'm feeling the desire for what this book calls a Brutal Purge, because I'm thinking about rereading another, similar book next.

Short Stories
Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon, by Vajra Chandrasekera. Post-mortem military service by the author of The Saint of the Bright Doors. Nuff said.

Movies & TV
Murderbot, episodes 7-9. We get to the climax and find out what's going on, finally, and everything blows up in everyone's faces. Next week: the payoff. Then I'm going to read the books. I continue to enjoy this series and especially Alexander Skarsgard's deadpan as he deals with his clients/cow orkers.

Music
Neave Trio, La mer: French Piano Trios & A Room of Her Own. Two albums of chamber music that I'm mostly not familiar with but definitely enjoyed. I picked this album because the trio has two women, putting them squarely in my "listen to more women in 2025" project, and because their newest album (the first) got a nice review in the Guardian.
Apple Essentials: Tangerine Dream. Pretty sure the answer here is still I really like the late Virgin era and am not so crazy about anything else.

Current Music: The Orb: The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

cupcake_goth

Remember how I said the Wegovy has cut down on the impulse shopping noise in my brain? It still has, but when a bunch of things on my "to buy someday Real Soon Now" all have sales over the 4th of July weekend? Yeah, I spent a lot of money. But this means that a dress, jacket, pendant, and art book were less than they had been, so yay?

... and this will certainly keep me from buying ALL THE MERCH at the MCR concert. Yes, it will.

:: shifty eyes ::

pauraque

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

Snack Shack
Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?
Creative prompt: Draw art of or make graphics of summer foods, or post your favorite summer recipes.

When I was growing up, the most coveted summer treat was universally acknowledged to be the It's-It. This is an ice cream sandwich made with soft oatmeal cookies, coated in a thin layer of chocolate. It was invented in San Francisco in 1928 and for decades it was sold only at the local amusement park Playland at the Beach. The Playland era was before my time, though; now It's-Its are sold prepackaged in stores and from roving food trucks all over the Bay Area.

I didn't realize until I moved away that It's-Its are made by a local company and nobody outside California had heard of them. I also didn't realize what a weird name they have until I tried to explain to other people what they were. "Itsits? What does that even mean?" I guess it made sense in the context of the 1920s when everyone was talking about "it girls" and having "it." (The movie It starring Clara Bow sounds like a horror title now, but it didn't in 1927!)

As a kid I never questioned it. The origin of the name did not matter. All that mattered was sitting on a sunny park bench after waiting patiently in line at the food truck, and finally biting into your precious It's-It, which instantly started melting, and trying to contain the ice cream in the flimsy crinkly plastic but always failing, having it drip all over your hands as it squeezed out from between the cookies with the chocolate coating cracking into melty bits. Pure summer childhood bliss.

You can actually order It's-Its online if you're in the US, and I've read that in recent years they've been selling them at brick and mortar stores outside California, though I haven't run into any in the wild. I've been told that they're pretty good even if the mere sight of them does not overwhelm you with nostalgia.

cupcake_goth

On Sunday night I ordered pork spring rolls from my favorite place with the idea of having one for dinner, and one for lunch the following day. As I was taking the second bite of my dinner, the Stroppy One turned to me and said that it had way more garlic than usual. He was right, because as he was saying that, I noticed my mouth and lips were burning and felt like welts were rising. I got a refund from DoorDash, and gave the Madwoman in the Attic the second spring roll. Sooooo apparently I'm even more sensitive to garlic than I thought, and I'm really mad about it.

---

My Chemical Romance alert! There's a post on Tumblr that's about the runup to the show with details being constantly added. Apparently setup for the concert has already started, which is unusual. I wonder if that's why there's more time between concert dates; I'd assumed it was because the band finally learned they need to rest between shows, but maybe not. The band has been hinting on social media that these concerts are "so much more than just playing The Black Parade". Needless to say, the fandom has collectively been losing our minds.

(THE CONCERT IS THIS FRIDAY FRIDAY FRIDAY!!!)

Yes, looking forward to this concert is one of the few things helping me cling to sanity right now.

brithistorian

Yesterday I finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I enjoyed it, but was frustrated with the ending — it seemed like it didn't end so much as just stopped.[^1] Today, I learned from cmcmck's comment on my July book record that this is actually the first book of a trilogy. This makes me feel better about the ending — I'll give an author more leeway on an ending when I know that a book is part of a series. But even if Mantel does give us a satisfying ending at the end of volume 3, that's still not going change the fact that, as much as I enjoyed the book, it feels like slice-of-life Thomas Cromwell fanfiction. (Of course, because it was professionally published and won awards, the literary establishment would quarrel with that characterization.)

[^1] Well, it didn't just stop — it reached a stopping place where one of the subplots had just resolved — but it didn't reach an actual conclusion.

brithistorian

Yesterday when I was in the grocery store, the music system started playing Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", and my mind started rewriting the lyrics, turning into part of a M/M mafia musical rom-com. Specifically, it's the song in Act 2 where the two main characters realize they have feelings for each other. Below are the new lyrics I wrote for the first verse, where person A is the small business owner (I'm thinking baker) who's in debt to the mafia[^1] boss and person B is the thug sent out by the mafia boss to collect on a loan.

A: Don't go breaking my arm. B: I'm s'posed to shatter your knee. A: Tell Vinny I'll get him his money. B: He's not so patient like me.

[^1] I just looked it up (because of course I did), when using mafia in a generic sense you don't capitalize it, and when referring to a specific organization (e.g. the Sicilian Mafia), you do.

thatyourefuse

... I don't happen to already know any proper fandom olds with functioning Fucking Weird Vibe detectors who are also getting ABSURDLY AND OBNOXIOUSLY invested in the current Dimension 20 campaign, do I? Because Jesus fucking Christ I have got to stop trying to find those on tumblr.

brithistorian

7 July
- Wolf Hall: A Novel (Hilary Mantel)
9 July
- Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 23 (Tomohito Oda)
- The Cartoonists Club (Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud)
10 July
- Adulthood Is a Gift (Sarah Andersen)
14 July
- I'm in Love with the Villainess, vol. 4 (Inori)
- Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 13 (Yuto Tsukuda)

brithistorian

This morning I was going to listen to Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove, but for one reason or another it's not available on YouTube Music, which is my streaming service of choice. So instead I decided to listen to American Eats Its Young. I'm only five songs in (out of 14) and I'm just blown away. I think it's both an amazing sign of how forward-thinking George Clinton was and a disheartening sign of how similar this country is today to what it was in 1972[^1], when this album was released, that the political messages in this album are still amazingly relevant today. If you don't have an hour and 10 minutes to listen to the whole album, I'd recommend the songs "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause" and "Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time."

[^1] Whether that's a result of lack of progress or of progress followed by regression is a discussion for another time.