Wednesday, August 6th, 2025 07:43 pm
Hello!

So since I last posted, I reached the gathering site in Alberta (a very swanky "cabin" in the Canadian Rockies, and I will not be any more specific than that, thank you very much). The get-together was WONDERFUL, which is unsurprising, but alas all good things must end so the vast majority of people left Sunday morning (July 20) in order to fly home (or in one case catch a bus to Banff). I drove northeast to Drumheller, leaving around 11ish, and that was the only day where I had to stop on the side of the road to pee in a ditch because Google Maps decided to route me via county roads through the middle of nowhere so I had no chance to find a gas station.

The Royal Tyrell Museum was EXCELLENT and I highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance. If you have the time, arrive in the morning to take a badlands hiking tour (this obviously did not work with my schedule), but the museum itself is still damn cool. I then spent the night in a "hotel" that was 7 rooms above an Indian restaurant. The room was fine! It was just kind of a surprise. But on the bright side, I bought a double order of garlic naan for an evening snack and proceeded to munch on that as car snacks for the next two days.

I also bought a t-shirt, a pair of socks, and a travel mug (no handle, has a tea-and-dinosaurs pun) from the museum gift shop. No regrets!

Monday the 21st I drove back south into the US and then took the Going-To-The-Sun Road from east to west through Glacier National Park. (I had previously acquired an America The Beautiful pass which gets you into ALL national parks, plus any sites managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, and US Army Corps of Engineers that charge an entrance fee.) Glacier is fucking BEAUTIFUL. Due to time constraints (and also weather; it was gray and drizzly during most of my visit) I didn't do any proper hiking, but I did get to walk upstream along Siyeh Creek for a little way.

I spent Monday night at a motel in Kalispell, west of Glacier, where I was able to wash a load of laundry. And I will post about the rest of my trip another day.

-----

In non-trip news, I am currently staying at Vicky's house while she is off on her own two-week road trip. She is circling through Chicago, Pittsburgh, NJ, DC, South Carolina, Tennessee, and then Chicago again on her way home to Minnesota. Meanwhile I am dogsitting Alfie, bringing in her mail, and generally making her house look lived-in rather than vacant.

What I get out of this is A) some distance from our parents, which is nice (I love them but it's still fundamentally awkward to live in their basement as a middle-aged adult); B) BETTER INTERNET (my parents' wifi works fine for anything word-based but is frankly tragic about images, gifs, and videos); and C) the company of one of the world's most adorable dogs. <3

In job search news, I have applied to two Not The IRS offices in the Twin Cities area (annoyingly you can't apply for a region -- you have to apply to each office individually). I have also updated my resume and tomorrow I am going to poke at LinkedIn until I can figure out how best to upload it and start refining my job search terms.

Also I may have fallen down a rabbit hole reading Ask A Manager columns, but shhh, we'll keep that as our little secret. ;)
Wednesday, August 6th, 2025 02:00 pm
books (Sasportas, Greene & Sasportas, Greene, Greene, Hodgson) )

family
the trip to help the parents has filled me with worry and preemptive grief. At least I fixed the tv in a few clicks of the remote and showed her how to use the Fire stick (again). Dad's got his westerns back and she's got her musicals. It's something.

house
my house is a disaster area again, and I'm overwhelmed and daunted by the amount of chores that needs doing. That is not helpful. Must get myself motivated to tackle (some of) it.

#resist
Monday, 9/01: Workers over Billionaires (#5051)

I hope all of you are doing well! <333
Wednesday, August 6th, 2025 06:52 pm
It's weird being away from home without being on holiday. My computer set-up here is working pretty well, although I haven't been exactly my most inspired work self; it's been a quiet week so far anyway, very few meetings or anything. But I'm very much missing my accustomed evening entertainments, or at least the ones I don't have with me (...I can read the internet as readily as ever), and cooking two sets of dinner takes up a surprising amount of the evening, even with a dishwasher (somehow full every day! for two people!) instead of having to do the washing up myself.

But Dad's back in the morning, so I get to go home at lunchtime! Very much looking forward to that. Although I will have to go straight into laundry and unpacking and then repacking for the office on Friday as usual, and I have a video call in the evening, so it'll be a busy day.

Still, it's been OK. I've been able to do my work and also supply such support as Mum actually needs (mostly it's just assembling straightforward meals and looking after the dishwasher, with an occasional small chore thrown in). I managed my M*A*S*H watching with Miss H (Radar just left! Am finding it hard to handle the concept of M*A*S*H without Radar) and have eaten most of the food I brought with me (and also the big bag of pistachios left over from Easter that my mother thought perhaps I could eat although probably not as fast as I did...). And tonight and tomorrow morning I need to pack my things back up into hopefully fewer than the "large rucksack, three big shopping bags, big monitor" that I arrived with, ready to escape.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 09:25 pm
I think I did The Tainted Cup a bit of a disservice in reading it For the Hugo Awards. It's a very competent book that is hitting all its beats at being both Fantasy Novel and Mystery Novel -- the world is detailed and well-realized (if a bit Attack on Titan-ish) and the plot hangs together in a sensible and logical way. In every way it is doing its job. Unfortunately in my heart I never want to give awards to things that are doing their job competently, I want to give awards to things that are trying to do something weird and interesting and ambitious even if they don't entirely succeed at it, so I kept squinting at The Tainted Cup like 'are you going to get weirder?' and the answer was, no! It continued working very reasonably through its fantasy mystery plot in an interesting and well-realized world!

The Tainted Cup follows Din Kol, a young man who has been magically altered to have perfect memory recall in order to act as an assistant to a highly-placed investigator, Eccentric Detective Ana Dolabra. [personal profile] genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike, which I have to take her word for since I've never experienced any Nero Wolfe; anyway, I admit her Eccentric Behavior did not always really land for me, but I can't deny it's in the Tradition and I do like Din, who's very polite.

This dynamic duo live in an Empire that is constantly under threat from Extremely Large Beasts that live outside the Big Wall and wreak massive destruction whenever they breach it. The existence of and need to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts justifies the rule of the Empire; the center of government exists in the center of the country and then people live in sort of concentric rings of safety around it, with the least safe of course being the area right next to the Big Wall. In order to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts, the Empire is constantly pushing forward experimental magical bioresearch projects that do things like 'alter people to have perfect memories' or 'grow very large and scary vines very very fast.'

When an important nobleman turns up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very very fast through his entire body, this is an interesting little murder problem. When a bunch of other people also turn up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very fast through their entire bodies -- in a way that also causes the vines to damage the structural integrity of the Big Wall -- this immediately becomes a large and scary murder problem which Din and Ana have to truck out to the absolute least safe bit of the country to try and solve.

As you can hopefully tell from this summary, the logic of the mystery and the logic of the world are very well-integrated with each other. The beats make sense as they land, and at every point you're given enough information to go 'ah, this clicks perfectly with what I already know about this world, and now I've learned a little more.' It's a good fantasy-mystery novel! I would like to see more fantasy-mystery that does this sort of thing well! The murder by exploding vines is very creepy!

I don't think it's a particularly spectacular novel for character -- there are Din and Ana, and there are a bunch of people who are required to make the mystery go, and there's a sort of flash-in-the-pan love-interest-shaped fellow for Din -- and I don't think it's much of a novel of ideas. Which absolutely not all books need to be, and which would not have been looking for it to be, had it not been multiply award-nominated. But that brings us right back around to the beginning of this post again.
Monday, August 4th, 2025 11:10 pm
You know how sometimes a show is more or less made for you in a lab, but also you watch the actual plot and you have some notes, and you're not actually sure it's good, per se, but also it was made for you in a lab?

Anyway, we just finished watching Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the Kim Tae Ri vehicle about 1950s Korean all-female theater troupes in which the entire plot revolves around aspiring young lesbians competing to see who's going to be the Prince of the Theater.

Please admire these official portraits of the main cast:



Jeongnyeon! Our Heroine. Baby butch. Massive protagonist energy. FORBIDDEN to sing by her mother, who has some kind of tragic lesbian performance backstory, despite that she has the BEST VOICE in a GENERATION. In episode four someone tries to make her sing full femme with no genderplay and she revolts on live television.



Moon Okyeong, the established theater prince!! beloved of every baby lesbian in 1950s Korea!! fishes Jeongnyeon out of the sticks and inspires her to join the troupe in the hopes of molding her into a COMPETITOR who can CURE Moon Okyeong's TRAGIC ENNUI and SCHRODINGER'S MORPHINE ADDICTION with the power of HOMOEROTIC RIVALRY.



Seo Hyerang, the theater's most important femme. Moon Okyeong's toxic partner who does not approve of Okyeong experiencing homoerotic protege/rival emotions.



Heo Yeongsoo! My favorite. Jeongnyeon's OWN baby butch rival that she made HERSELF in the classic rival mode, a stiff and reserved rich girl with Family Issues whose Haughty Pride covers a Profound Passion for Theater, who only really comes alive when she gets to go onstage in full drag and play a prince or a villain. A real Mr. Darcy of a lesbian.

Jeongnyeon and Yeongsoo also have their own same-age femme whom they're constantly competing to perform with who for some reason does not get lead actress billing or one of these cool character portraits even though she is to all intents and purposes the female lead ... anyway here she is, she's extremely cute but needs to pick up some skills in communication



The experience of actually watching the show is a a bit of a roller coaster ... like one episode you're watching Jeongnyeon make the worst decisions that a human has ever made in their life, and the next episode you're just sitting back enjoying the experience of Theater Lesbians Practice The Big Villain Seduction Scene In Every Possible Casting Variation, and the next episode everyone is getting together to do the big performance when apparently nobody has ever practiced their actual blocking together before and you're like "why are you like this. surely a theater troupe cannot run this way" and then the next episode Moon Okyeong is looking simply unbelievably good in a suit.

Honestly most of the time even when something annoying was happening there was some lesbian looking good in an Outfit, so even at the times I was suffering I did not suffer! And most of the time I was not suffering, because a truth about me is I love absurd Method Theater Drama where people are constantly going out to Find their Characters and saying to each other 'show me ... your interpretation of the Foolish General! The one only you could bring!' My many years of reading Skip Beat! have prepared me perfectly for this experience.

[nb: when I say lesbians, nobody is doing anything more than tender embraces or fraught handholding on screen, and nobody is saying 'I am a lesbian', but like they are very unambiguously lesbians. The entire plot is powered by lesbian drama. Every two episodes or so a man shows up to do something like 'embezzle money' or 'vaguely menace' and then exits again.]

Do I think the ending is fully satisfying? No. Will I be requesting it for Yuletide? DESPERATELY. I hope they keep letting Kim Tae Ri play intense lesbians forever.

(Also, if anyone knows where to find scanlations of the webtoon it's based on, I am Extremely Interested in reading them ...)
Sunday, August 3rd, 2025 04:04 pm
I think I might be a little bit cursed today. This morning I walked down from Mum's house to the corner shop to get her newspaper, and my left boot completely untied itself twice in less than ten minutes, with no previous signs of loosening or jolt from me treading on a lace-end. Then when I got there at 08:55 it was closed, even though the website said it opened at 08:00 on Sunday. Fortunately someone arrived to open up at 09:03 so I did at least get the paper, and made it home without any more mysterious knot failures.

Then my phone developed a number of interesting alternative responses to me trying to scroll webpages - scrolling part of the distance I asked for, then jolting back up most of the way to the starting point; zooming in; moving sideways; really anything and everything except just, you know, scrolling. It's been behaving slightly more reasonably this afternoon, so I'm crossing my fingers that I'm not going to have to replace it...

On the other hand, my family apparently enjoyed me being in more-or-less the same timezone as everyone else on the crossword call, rather than lagging three seconds behind like I do at home, so it's not all bad. And I've set up my work laptop with a second monitor and a mouse and keyboard (although the mouse wheel is weirdly and upsettingly... sticky... enough to leave my finger sticky afterwards!).

One day down, four to go until Dad's back, and then I can go home! It's amazing how much longer Sunday is when I don't have any computer games to play. And my parents are very nice and their house is fine, but it's just not the same. I've been living alone too long.
Sunday, August 3rd, 2025 11:14 am
god have I really not posted about Voyager in a year and a half?? we are still very slowly watching Voyager! we are almost at the end of season six! but I am NOT posting about thirty episodes in a single post so, let's see, I left off with Latent Image, let's see what I remember about the rest of Season 5.

Voyager Season 5, Episodes 12-26 )

WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.
Friday, August 1st, 2025 02:50 pm
Last time I saw my hairstylist, she had just bought four chicks and was embarking on a lifestyle of backyard chicken-keeping. She told me all their names. It was sweet.

Turns out chick-sexing is an imperfect art. Over the intervening month, she started to hear one of the birds crowing, but it took a while to figure out which one. It was Dottie.

My stylist called everybody she knew out in the county until she found someone who was both interested in rooster and zoned for rooster. When she was carrying Dottie out to the car to take him to his new home, he crowed a goodbye at the coop as they passed.

Out of the coop they heard some farewell cackling. And more crowing.
Tags:
Thursday, July 31st, 2025 07:52 am
I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when [personal profile] osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is [personal profile] osprey_archer's post.

I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.

I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!

The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.

To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.

Now both [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," [personal profile] osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)

However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.

Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'

With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.
Wednesday, July 30th, 2025 03:40 pm
books: Greene and Sasportas, Nicholas, Greene and Sasportas, Greene and Sasportas, Sasportas )

yarning
I went to yarn group and had a really nice time. A friend there gave me a gently used pair of Merrill running shoes which she'd worn just too much to return and not enough to feel good about donating. They fit me perfectly, so yay!

family
mom asked me to come up and help, as they're both in really bad shape, healthwise. And also their TV and/or modem has died and they want me to fix it. I have no idea how to do that, so, that'll be fun. :(

#resist
August 2: 50501 Rage Against the Regime National Protest
August 3: first Move On "Won't Back Down" rally.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333
Wednesday, July 30th, 2025 06:56 pm
Just for [personal profile] isis!

I spent most of my week off playing Mass Effect: Andromeda obsessively, and am now about two-thirds through, according to the save game screen. Detailed thoughts - with spoilers )

Anyway, I think from here I am heading fairly rapidly towards the end game.

Other things I have played since my last gaming post:

  • A Normal Lost Phone and Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story - really nice tiny games, no more than an hour each, where you "find a lost phone" and have to look through it to find out whose phone it is and how it was lost. I got the first one in a Pride sale, and they're both fairly Issue-y, but felt well done. No real replayability, but well worth the couple of quid each they cost - I would buy more in this series.

  • Got a bit addicted to Terraforming Mars for a while and played quite a few games. I'd played this as a board game with S and her husband a few years back, but we ended up getting confused about some of the rules and failing to score things correctly - that sort of game is just so much easier as a computer game where it keeps track of all your special abilities and so on for you! Also, the music is gorgeous but sadly I can't find anywhere I can buy it.

  • I played the start of Paper Trail, looking for something a bit like Carto; it's not, really, but there's a somewhat similar mechanic where you origami fold the screen in order to reach the other side of a broken bridge, etc; I quite enjoyed it, and should go back to it.

  • Venba is a game in which you cook a series of South Indian recipes as an excuse to explore the immigrant experience (specifically as an Indian in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s). It's really charming, and I liked the whole family; the "puzzles" are really mostly an excuse, but it was quite fun anyway (...well, maybe except for the idli steamer when I had to do it a third time while trying to get the achievement for making everything correctly...).

  • I'd heard lots of good things about Chants of Sennaar, and picked up the demo, which was delightful; you're a mysterious hooded figure exploring a city? palace? and interacting with other mysterious figures, who talk to you in symbols which you can slowly work out the meanings of; once you do, you can hover over the speech bubbles and get partial and full translations.

    I loved the demo, and bought the full game a couple of weeks later in a sale, but have run into a wall of frustration ) I liked this enough that I do want to keep playing it, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough...

  • While I was on the watery games kick from last time, I also played a few hours of In Other Waters, where you are a scientist exploring an alien planet where another person had previously disappeared, navigating the underwater world and learning about the flora and fauna while trying to find her. Again, this was satisfying to play, but I got a bit stuck about an hour and a half in, and can't work out what to do next - and it's frustrating to backtrack, because you can't jump around or zoom out and see the whole map, you're stuck moving from visible point to visible point in your current map section.

  • Briefly went back to Submachine and did another couple of levels. Also played some Hidden Folks, which is a Where's Wally type of thing only monochrome and with some of the little figures animated, again using hint guides to find the last few items in most of the scenes! There are levels of varying difficulty, but mostly it's either "tiny level, dead easy" or "massive level, super hard", without much middle ground.

  • And I just started Monument Valley III, which was released about a week ago! I loved the first two games, which are very gentle meditative puzzles where you manipulate buildings in a sort of Escher-esque fashion so that your little person can get from one point to another, rotating a walkway so that your path is suddenly linked to the arch overhead etc. I'm playing it very slowly, no more than one level at a time, and having a good time so far.

  • I also just picked up Dorfromantik, which I'd heard a lot of good things about; again it's quite mellow. So far it seems a bit like a sort of single-player Carcassonne, you put hexagonal territory tiles together to build villages and forests and rivers and railways and fields, and the tiles come with point-bearing challenges to do things like connect village tiles together until you have 25 houses in a clump, or 465 trees, or whatever, plus there's points for having a hex where all six sides match their neighbours, and so on. I expect there's fiendish depths of strategy that I will never actually explore, but at the moment it's about 20 minutes for a game and I'm quite enjoying it; I can see myself picking this up every so often to play for a bit.

Sunday, July 27th, 2025 11:17 pm
I was sitting outside at work two weeks ago reading Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines when our regular volunteer suddenly popped up next to me. "What are you reading?!" she demanded, and I blinked at her, and she said "I can't remember the last time I smiled as much reading a book as you were right now! Please tell me the title, I have to read it!"

So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)

So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.

Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)

As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.

Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.
Sunday, July 27th, 2025 03:43 pm
Five Musicians Who Owe Their Careers To Stack Moore (And One Who Doesn’t) (394 words) by Resonant
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sinners (2025)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elias "Stack" Moore, Billie Holiday, Paul Simon, Lil Nas X (Musician), Rhiannon Gidden (Musician), Sarah Vaughan (Musician), Prince (Musician)
Additional Tags: music industry, RPF if you're a real stickler
Summary:

It's who you know.



Beta thanks to [personal profile] mific and [personal profile] terminally_underwhelmed.