rikibeth | Reading

Taking desensitisation to the next level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXKxpTYRb9I

Giving new meaning to feeding the birds: https://youtube.com/shorts/iTrPDslstjk?si=1seASuqmRsdM0gTb (warning: nature red in tooth and talon)

batwrangler

I'm not sure training this level of problem soving is a great idea (unless that's Sgt. Angua): https://youtube.com/shorts/jDoVvHQWscc?si=yKL5QEWaSq15v04x

cupcake_goth

(The container from the refrigerated section.)

I had some for lunch Monday, felt unwell and had a lot of problems sleeping, then woke up early suffering nausea, chills and a fever, excruciating muscle pain, a bad headache, and overwhelming fatigue.

I did the right thing and tapped out on Tuesday and Wednesday with the hopes of being back to work today. The overwhelming vertigo and inability to think clearly killed that idea.

I am, of course, worrying about 1) the massive chaos I’ll return to, and 2) that’s three sick days that aren’t part of my intermittent leave, how does that look to management, something something job security?

ugh.

gentlyepigrams

Went out of town two weekends in a row so the media consumption has been slow.

Books
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, by Rob Osler. Second case in the Harriet Morrow series, featuring a lesbian PI in Chicago at the turn of the previous century. This case wove in anarchists and immigrants and more of the backstory of the employer, oh my! Still in for the next one.
Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field. This was a relatively slow and difficult read, and if you're not into the minutiae of politics, probably not worth your time. It was interesting enough to me to read all the way through, even though I had to reborrow from the library to finish it. But the people involved are collectively awful and I hope they all end up in jail, especially those with Texas ties, or at least banished from public life like the unAmerican assholes they are.
The Cleaving, by Juliet E. McKenna. It's kind of hard to write an old magic story starring the women of Camelot in the long wake of Mists of Avalon, but that's McKenna's self-chosen aim. She has all the elements and she handles them well, which is to say the story points she chooses from the myth all work together in a way that makes sense to me. But she cannot, or at least does not, make or remake the myth.

Short Stories
The Metamorphosis. The protagonist is turned into an animal that is not a cockroach. When you read it, the meaning is obvious.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

gentlyepigrams

Can You Pass the Sober Date Test? I'm married and even if I weren't, I'd be on the never-deliberately-date-again train, but this is useful and good for those who are on the dating scene.
Indy Neidell's Baseball History Time Machine. The coolest guy in my high school graduating class also has a baseball podcast.
Lamster: Is that building really going to look like that? With AI rendering, the answer is: probably not.
The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2026. I'm glad they didn't go out of business, mostly, but I don't want to do what they're doing. I miss the OG Drafthouse where it was quiet and I bet they now do ads instead of the old school pre-show, or they soon will.
The 1982 One-Hit Wonder You Probably Missed Was a Protest Song. Safety Dance. TIL!
Actually, People Love to Work Hard. When their job doesn't suck. Anil Dash.
Inside I.M. Pei’s Rare Fort Worth Residence in Westover Hills. Another TIL.
Spyre's inflammatory bowel drug shown to reduce disease activity in mid-stage study. I have so many friends who could benefit from this! Fingers crossed.
When Were Credit Cards Invented? I'm just old enough to remember Bank Americard (now Visa), so this is not really history to me.
Related: How the Equal Credit Opportunity Act Transformed Women’s Economic Power. Also not entirely history: I was a kid when this law was passed.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

julian

A friend of mine died last week. He was, all in all, much more a friend of friends of mine, plus he was one of Calluna's sort-of-exes, but he *was* also one of my local friends, though I hadn't seen him in eons. Quiet, political, slid funny into everything like a very friendly dagger. African American, aware of it, aware of the political implications. Fannish.

He was

telepresence over on LJ, though I don't think he ever came over here.

Calluna (who is White) tells the story of how they were walking along somewhere or other in Boston, in the early 2000s, (or possibly late 90s) and she suddenly noticed them getting odd looks and she stopped in the middle of a crosswalk and said, "...Wait..." and then loudly burst out, "Are you telling me I'm dating a man and I'm *still* not socially acceptable?"

I don't know if COVID-19 had anything to do with this -- he was having heart failure for a few years, apparently -- but I will take the opportunity to link to

werpiper's memorial talk at Ny's Online Thing anyway, because it *might* have. As she notes, there is a lot of Not Talking About It.

pauraque

We are going out of town for spring break! I expect to be back on Sunday. 🏖️

pauraque

This is the first part of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now, an anthology of speculative fiction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. I was glad to see that the introduction included the editor's thoughts about each piece (something that has been lacking in some of the anthologies we've read). The editor says that Aboriginal authors of SF have have historically had more success publishing their work as literary fiction than in SF outlets, suggesting a disconnect between white and Indigenous understandings of what "speculative" looks like. They point out, for example, that a time travel story may look very different through a cultural lens that doesn't see time as entirely linear in the first place.

The editor also says that they solicited several stories for the collection from writers who had never written SF before. Perhaps it is unfair that my reaction was to brace myself; I'll strive to be open minded. (It was also pointed out in the discussion that the Indigenous population of Australia is pretty small, so the pool of potential authors may not have been as deep as the editor might have wished.)

Some group members were not thrilled to learn that the book includes some excerpts from novels. We've run into this before and it tends to frustrate our purpose as a discussion group because we end up having the same conversation over and over, which is just "this didn't feel complete... because it isn't complete." The first three pieces we read are actual short stories, though!

"Muyum, a Transgression" by Evelyn Araluen (2017)

( A ghost travels the ruins of the world, finding that what seemed dead can come back. )

"Clatter Tongue" by K.A. Ren Wyld (2020)

[Note: The book lists this story under the author's former name Karen Wyld.]

( A grieving girl literally vomits the detritus of colonization when she is threatened. )

"Closing Time" by Samuel Wagan Watson (2020)

( In the early days of covid, a man wanders aimlessly. )

gentlyepigrams

Putting this one in for Tircon:

In the far future, King Martin rules Amber and Emperor Merlin rules Chaos. Between them, the universe is frozen in tyranny. The last bastion of freedom is the Free Republic of Ygg, ruled by the ancient wizard Tree, and their agents: you!

Rumor has reached the Free Republic of a wizard creating rainbow bridges between Shadows. Traveling in an airship, this person is linking shadows that had previously been far apart and collecting favors for their work. Is this an agent of King Martin? An agent of Emperor Merlin? An independent agent? Tree wants to know and they've asked you to find out.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

delphi

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

pauraque

In the decade between the original SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), Maxis released an interesting variety of life simulation games on different scales, many of which are now largely forgotten in the shadows of their two juggernaut cousins. Coming close on the heels of the macro-scale SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), lead designer Will Wright zoomed way down into the weeds to bring us SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991).

popup describes ant castes over a map of an underground nest

While you can learn a lot about real life systems from many of the early Maxis games, SimAnt leans more educational than most. You'll learn how ants forage, communicate, build and defend the nest, and produce new queens to found more colonies. Then you'll apply your knowledge to defeat and eliminate enemy ants, spread across the back yard, and invade the house until the homeowner gives up and moves away. It's a good time!

( More on SimAnt [content warning: talking spiders] )

You can play SimAnt in your browser, though the performance is sluggish. Running it in DOSBox is a little better.

delphi

Fandom 50 #10

When I was putting together this list of Canadian songs I love from the last fifty years, some years had a clear favourite jump out at me while others had too many bangers to choose between. (Seriously, 1993 turned out to be the keystone year whose ultimate selection affected everything from 1987 to 2001.) But 1986 was the first stumper.

I don't think it's the case that 1986 was a mid year for Canadian music. It's more likely that it's just the first year I was properly conscious of music, with the releases getting replayed throughout my early childhood until they became background noise. These are third-favourite albums from artists whose later eras hit stronger for me, songs I slept through during my first concert as a toddler, and snippets from radio bumpers that earworm me to this day.

So, without a stronger personal preference, the clear choice was the Canadian song of 1986. The one that everyone loved and then became so inescapable that everyone hated it, and which is probably on schedule for a revival soon if it gets used in the right commercial or CBC show. However you feel about it, it's hard to find something more Canadian than this.

Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell

Watch on YouTube

cupcake_goth

But I don't know if I'll actually follow through. You see, for the past week and a bit, no matter what tarot or oracle deck I pull a card from, they all have the same essential message: REST, GODDAMMIT. You know, that thing I'm terrible at, even tho' I encourage other people to do it.

---

I wish the Stroppy One was more interested in wandering through thrift stores and antique malls. I always explain to him that it's not about buying things, it's about window shopping and finding really weird things. But no, he's not interested. Drat. (Tho' I do need to look into taking the occasional Tuesday or Tuesday early evening off, because that's the day of "senior discount" at the local Discovery Shop and Value Village, and hell yes I want to take advantage of that.

pauraque

While collecting the necessary materials for my Le Guin reading project, I found she had a story which appeared only in the 1973 anthology Clarion III. This was a product of the 1972 Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week course for aspiring speculative fiction writers, taught by a rotating slate of guest instructors. Le Guin was a Clarion instructor that year, and while most of the instructors contributed essays on writing or on the workshop itself, she instead wrote a story.

Since I'd bothered to acquire the book, I figured I'd read the whole thing. But I took my time about it since Le Guin's story didn't seem important to the general arc of her career, though obviously it's significant that her stature had grown to the point where she was invited to teach. So although my reading of her work has progressed in the meantime to 1979 (and will continue from there if the person who currently has The Language of the Night checked out ever returns it to the library!!) we're going to take a short trip back to 1973 here.

Le Guin's story "The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" is a fictionalized version of an exercise she gave the students, using them as the characters and reimagining the whole thing as a SF experiment. I guess in reality she built a mobile out of found objects (the titular construct) and told the class to write about it. I'm sure her story was amusing to the people who were there, but out of context I found it impenetrable. (And hold that thought, because I'm gonna circle back to it.)

As for the student stories, I liked a handful of them, but most were either not to my taste, or seemed underdeveloped in some way, or were so steeped in 1970s gender politics and/or sophomoric "dirty joke" humor that the generation gap was too wide for me to cross. To be fair, these are student stories, but none of them sent me running to look for the authors' later work.

( discussion of selected works )

( full list of included works )

gentlyepigrams

We finished one task this fortnight: tunfortunately, the trip to Austin (for a memorial). I also made progress on a bunch of the ongoing items.

( List under the cut. )

Upcoming soon: the trip to NOLA for the family wedding, another trip to Austin, and possibly an overnight & museum trip to Fort Worth, depending on whether we decide to return from a concert. Also concert season is coming and I am delighted.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

gentlyepigrams

Kichi Bar in Carrollton (known in DFW as the place to go to get various types of Asian food) is a sushi bar and Japanese restaurant owned by Uchi refugees/graduates. Since the Austin Japanese scene is basically run by folks who have gone through the Uchi machine, we thought this was promising. We had an 8:30 reservation, the place was not quite empty, and we had more sushi after 9:00 when late happy hour kicked.

We spent an arm and a leg for three of us on all different kinds of food (sushi, maki, crudo, other dishes including uni pasta, and a sando for our friend Ian. But it was so good! We will definitely be back. But I will be sure to make reservations again since as soon as people figure out about this place it's going to fill up.

Current Music: Wind chimes.

pauraque

As a kid I never played any of The Learning Company's dozens of Reader Rabbit games, so today we'll be correcting this surprising gap in my edutainment knowledge.

zorealis suggested the first game in the series, 1984's Reader Rabbit, aka Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. The alternate title sounds suspiciously Oompa-Loompaish to me, so fingers crossed that we will not meet with any gruesome poetic justice.

The game's menu offers nine options: Sorter, Labeler, Word Train, and six different Matchup Games. In Sorter you get a series of words, and you have to decide whether each one matches a given letter in either the first, second, or third position. If it matches, you move it over to the side, but if it doesn't you throw it in the garbage. (This obviously predates the 1990s eco-tainment craze, or else we'd be recycling.)

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

( More on Reader Rabbit )

Reader Rabbit was wildly popular and led to a slew of sequels and spinoffs. I had never heard of 1986's Writer Rabbit until

delphi brought it to my attention. Now, I'm not saying that playing this game will make you as good of a writer as

delphi is... but I'm not not saying that.

While Reader Rabbit offers a solid but fairly staid selection of spelling exercises, Writer Rabbit is far more wacky. After punching out from a week of back-breaking labor at the Word Factory, it's time to attend Writer Rabbit's Sentence Party and cut loose with a mix of games mashing up sentence diagramming and Mad Libs. In the Ice Cream Game, you are given a phrase and have to identify it as either WHO, WHAT, DID WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, or HOW.

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

( More on Writer Rabbit )

You can play Reader Rabbit and Writer Rabbit on the Internet Archive, for the finest in lapine-themed edutainment. Did anyone else play a game from this series? There are a million of them!

julian

On Sunday, we had Ny's Online Thing. (Wake. Memorial.)

It was very good; full of singing and poetry and science facts and art and memories and sadnesses. and made me sort of/almost cry at various time periods, but because I was the Official Zoom Host I felt like I couldn't, like, take breaks, which is of course Never True. Once it finished, I ended up with a dyspeptic-and-congestion-related headache that took a bit to clear out, but it did eventually.

There were a thousand small details that I didn't quite think of, which makes sense because generally I'm not the one hosting large Zooms, or, for that matter, organizing memorials. And also, the sad.

The general inchoate "we" of the Discord have been hashing out ethical stuff about posting and/or linking to the video of the memorial. Because, it was a semi-public event, but also private, and the simultaneous chat in particular had a lot of linking up wallet names and online handles that is perfectly fine in a semi-private space, but less so in the wider world. And yet, one of the things I appreciated about Ny was that she created a life where she could, to the extent possible, be as much herself as she could, out loud, and I don't want her life's celebration muffled.

But, we didn't quite make it clear that it might be posted later, or ask people if they were OK with it being posted (see above re: small details), and in the general sense, we're fans of opt-in rather than opt-out. So we've come to a (current) compromise. I am quite positive there will be further movement later. (For all I know, someone'll make it a Project to ask everyone who was there if they're OK with it being public, or if they'd like their identities ambiguated. I'm sure not doing it, though, because I have overdue client notes to write.) But anyway, for now, we're not sending out the chat, but will send out the video. So!

If you're interested, either

a) email vicka about it, and she can send you the video. (vicka's the one with the Ny Page, which was where I originally found out about the dying-of-COVID part. Her email is findable on the wider andor pages.)

or b) PM me/comment here/email me/send me a carrier pigeon, and I can send you a link to the video, which is on Mega, which is how I got it to vicka because I decided I wasn't up to figuring out SCP. I'm not including the chat there because of the aforementioned linkages.

Or c)

gingicat is, soon, going to post the link to the announce-list, if you're on that.

gentlyepigrams

Short list this week because I spent the weekend away.

'Unsigned and neglected': These artworks are by women – but men got the credit. I knew the Genteleschi, of course, but the others were new to me.
‘She-Hulk’ Was Apparently One of Marvel’s Most Successful Shows. Huh. I was potentially interested because of Tatiana Maslany but never got around to it while we had Disney.
Inside the Original Dallas Cast's Lives 48 Years After the Show Premiered. When I lived in England as a teen, I was asked if I'd ever met J R Ewing. For real.
Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time. In the year 2026.
Here Is What The Same Person Looks Like In Dressing Rooms For 20 Different Stores. Old (2015) and probably irrelevant because we all buy our clothes online now, but still really interesting.
May I End My Life With You? The author and her friend, who died by suicide, are CFS/ME patients. This resonated with me in a big way.
Dallas' nationally renowned Kate Weiser Chocolate to close its doors. Aw man, they were my go-to good local food gift.
Growing Old Is the Best Performance of Harrison Ford's Career. 1. I am going to have to give in and watch this show. and 2. He is still the bestest ever just like he was when I was a kid.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

delphi

Fandom 50 #9

For my 1985 pick, it feels like a good day for five minutes of surreal geography-themed art pop.

Map of the World, Pt. II by Jane Siberry

Watch on YouTube