on the approach to this birthday
Aug. 20th, 2025 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elisem Life is certainly enhanced with the improvement of available captioning in real time through various browsers and software. I want to have virtual tea with so many different people! I can see what they are saying! And it doesn't leave me exhausted the way lip-reading so often does. Maybe making a whole bunch of virtual tea dates will be another set of birthday presents. Things to look forward to. Always good.
Also there needs to be some storytelling. Some virtual storytelling gatherings, I mean. Even more things to look forward to. In the meantime, I plan to continue enjoying the next few days as we approach Friday, which is the birthday actual.
If anybody wants to do a kind thing, letting people know about my Birthday Month Sale is a very kind thing indeed, and maximizes the amount of good stuff like bill-paying and bead-acquiring that this Lioness is able to do. <3 <3 <3
LionessElise's Birthday Month Sale:
Sale goes all through the month of August.
As usual, there will be special birthday markdowns on the 22nd.
There will be more markdowns as the month goes on.
Expect the last days to be lively. And the last hours to be very bouncy indeed.
When it's done, anything left goes back to full price.
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise
Also there needs to be some storytelling. Some virtual storytelling gatherings, I mean. Even more things to look forward to. In the meantime, I plan to continue enjoying the next few days as we approach Friday, which is the birthday actual.
If anybody wants to do a kind thing, letting people know about my Birthday Month Sale is a very kind thing indeed, and maximizes the amount of good stuff like bill-paying and bead-acquiring that this Lioness is able to do. <3 <3 <3
LionessElise's Birthday Month Sale:
Sale goes all through the month of August.
As usual, there will be special birthday markdowns on the 22nd.
There will be more markdowns as the month goes on.
Expect the last days to be lively. And the last hours to be very bouncy indeed.
When it's done, anything left goes back to full price.
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise
I'll have the indecision platter and a side order of WTF, please.
Aug. 20th, 2025 12:08 amelisem[Content Notes: this is a discussion of food and eating, and diabetes and new experiences, and I am a recovering eating disorder person. If that's not what you want to read about right now, please skip with my good wishes.]
Since it's that time of the year, I have been ordering a few things, telling myself that I might as well try them for this birthday rather than wait, because the possibilities of various tariffs may put them out of reach in the future. When I say that the indecision platter is often my favorite thing on the menu, I'm talking about those meals that have samplers of several sort of dish. They are very good for learning about the range of foods sometimes. Also they can be a dopamine hit jackpot, at least for me. (If it's the dopamine that's providing the fun in here, as people who know the recent hypotheses tell me.)
They also save time if I can't make up my mind, which can be handy.
When looking at an unfamiliar menu, do you usually first make note of what you've never had before? Is it even more intriguing if you'd never heard of it before?
The ordering has been proceeding with perhaps too much vigor, but hey. I have so few wild indulgences left on my to-do list these days, or should I say the can-do list? Probably. But I am doing my best to be sensible. I took the canned haggis off the list because I already know I love haggis. I did not take the little durian cakes off the list because although I already know I love durian, they were just a few dollars and MUST HAVE. (Note to self: ask brother-in-law to scope out CostCo's supply again. A year or two ago they had multipacks of durian mooncakes for ridiculously good prices. Om nom nom.) Some of my favorite drinks are coming (Milkis and San Pellegrino pomegranate/orange drink) because I fully expect tariffs to play hob with their prices. Even now they are a bunch higher than they were, but a person sufficiently motivated can make a melograno/arancia drink be the long-lasting slowly savored high point of their day, which is how I'll be approaching those.
There are some garlic sable cookies coming. Garlic sable cookies! I have never! I must! Those are an excellent example of the treasured WTF category. If it makes me immediately ask "Can you DO that??" it's a WTF delight and I want to know what it's like. Or to put it another way, my ignorance has provided endless opportunities for learning, and learning is so often so much fun -- and very tasty.
Part of the reason I'll be savoring things slowly is that I'm adapting to living with type 2 diabetes, which I've been dealing with for a year now. I got really, really lucky and got two excellent things from becoming a Metformin taker. One is an effect, and the other is, I think, a side effect. The effect is that it apparently went and repaired whatever sensor in me has to do with satiation, and tweaked the setting some, so I turn out to be done having food now,, thank you very much, earlier than I historically have been. A lot of this is because -- OK, I don't know if anybody else has this, but I used to do comfort eating, where certain things are very soothing. And that's different now. There is no soothing from food. It was pretty startling when I realized it. It's so weird when suddenly it does not work. I mean, at ALL. So that's one thing, and I think it's an effect. The other thing is a side effect, but I do not mind it. It is this: everything tastes wonderful. No, I mean WONDERFUL. Plastic packet ramen might as well be gourmet. But the effect mentioned earlier holds: I don't feel like overeating. No matter how wonderful. I can go "Oh, that was so good," mean it entirely, and then go do the next thing.
It is all so very weird. But it's kind of fun. (I appear to have also lost the ability to fret about food or weight or whatever.) We shall see where it leads.
Right now where it's leading is to ordering some birthday treats and then wondering how long they will last under the new schedule of savoring things. (The only thing I have found that I nom more than I want of is Swedish Bubs in pomegranate/strawberry flavor. Well, and those jelly snails. But those are both texture craving things, and that's a different issue.) Neurodiversity and food stuff is complicated even before getting to the land of Metformin. So far, though, it's better rather than not, even the uncomfortable bits where a coping mechanism isn't any more and needs to change. In the meantime, though, I have durian cakes and garlic sables and fruit-juice-filled gumme koi coming, and life is good that way.
Is there a new-to-you thing you have tasted that was a learning experience? Was it a delight? Was it tasty? Do you have texture cravings? Other cravings? Did you ever do comfort eating and then have it stop working for you? What then? (I find myself going to the workbench more. Which is not a bad result, really. Art is also comfort. Still comfort, I guess I should say. Do you have anything like that?)
Since it's that time of the year, I have been ordering a few things, telling myself that I might as well try them for this birthday rather than wait, because the possibilities of various tariffs may put them out of reach in the future. When I say that the indecision platter is often my favorite thing on the menu, I'm talking about those meals that have samplers of several sort of dish. They are very good for learning about the range of foods sometimes. Also they can be a dopamine hit jackpot, at least for me. (If it's the dopamine that's providing the fun in here, as people who know the recent hypotheses tell me.)
They also save time if I can't make up my mind, which can be handy.
When looking at an unfamiliar menu, do you usually first make note of what you've never had before? Is it even more intriguing if you'd never heard of it before?
The ordering has been proceeding with perhaps too much vigor, but hey. I have so few wild indulgences left on my to-do list these days, or should I say the can-do list? Probably. But I am doing my best to be sensible. I took the canned haggis off the list because I already know I love haggis. I did not take the little durian cakes off the list because although I already know I love durian, they were just a few dollars and MUST HAVE. (Note to self: ask brother-in-law to scope out CostCo's supply again. A year or two ago they had multipacks of durian mooncakes for ridiculously good prices. Om nom nom.) Some of my favorite drinks are coming (Milkis and San Pellegrino pomegranate/orange drink) because I fully expect tariffs to play hob with their prices. Even now they are a bunch higher than they were, but a person sufficiently motivated can make a melograno/arancia drink be the long-lasting slowly savored high point of their day, which is how I'll be approaching those.
There are some garlic sable cookies coming. Garlic sable cookies! I have never! I must! Those are an excellent example of the treasured WTF category. If it makes me immediately ask "Can you DO that??" it's a WTF delight and I want to know what it's like. Or to put it another way, my ignorance has provided endless opportunities for learning, and learning is so often so much fun -- and very tasty.
Part of the reason I'll be savoring things slowly is that I'm adapting to living with type 2 diabetes, which I've been dealing with for a year now. I got really, really lucky and got two excellent things from becoming a Metformin taker. One is an effect, and the other is, I think, a side effect. The effect is that it apparently went and repaired whatever sensor in me has to do with satiation, and tweaked the setting some, so I turn out to be done having food now,, thank you very much, earlier than I historically have been. A lot of this is because -- OK, I don't know if anybody else has this, but I used to do comfort eating, where certain things are very soothing. And that's different now. There is no soothing from food. It was pretty startling when I realized it. It's so weird when suddenly it does not work. I mean, at ALL. So that's one thing, and I think it's an effect. The other thing is a side effect, but I do not mind it. It is this: everything tastes wonderful. No, I mean WONDERFUL. Plastic packet ramen might as well be gourmet. But the effect mentioned earlier holds: I don't feel like overeating. No matter how wonderful. I can go "Oh, that was so good," mean it entirely, and then go do the next thing.
It is all so very weird. But it's kind of fun. (I appear to have also lost the ability to fret about food or weight or whatever.) We shall see where it leads.
Right now where it's leading is to ordering some birthday treats and then wondering how long they will last under the new schedule of savoring things. (The only thing I have found that I nom more than I want of is Swedish Bubs in pomegranate/strawberry flavor. Well, and those jelly snails. But those are both texture craving things, and that's a different issue.) Neurodiversity and food stuff is complicated even before getting to the land of Metformin. So far, though, it's better rather than not, even the uncomfortable bits where a coping mechanism isn't any more and needs to change. In the meantime, though, I have durian cakes and garlic sables and fruit-juice-filled gumme koi coming, and life is good that way.
Is there a new-to-you thing you have tasted that was a learning experience? Was it a delight? Was it tasty? Do you have texture cravings? Other cravings? Did you ever do comfort eating and then have it stop working for you? What then? (I find myself going to the workbench more. Which is not a bad result, really. Art is also comfort. Still comfort, I guess I should say. Do you have anything like that?)
The Usual
Aug. 19th, 2025 07:14 pmtablesawSometimes I think about "Earl Grey, hot."
When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.
The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.
Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.
In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.
Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.
When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.
The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.
Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.
In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.
Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.
(no subject)
Aug. 19th, 2025 09:22 pmskygiantsThe last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.
A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.
( ungenerous readings below )
A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.
( ungenerous readings below )
Weddings
Aug. 19th, 2025 06:45 pmlivThis weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.
( wedding squee )
I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s.jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.
( wedding squee )
I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s.
jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.
Assorted things
Aug. 19th, 2025 02:53 pmoursinThis has me thinking (for that is the way I roll) 'who is the novelist that this has escaped from?': Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture -
“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” said Lawrence. “If you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”
Could be a ponderous CP Snow tome, could be a Lodge or Bradbury send-up (Lodge of course already did academe/business collab, no?), or dear Sir Angus sniping acerbicly.
***
A more cheerful thing: Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour saved for nation
***
More on heritage and reconstructing the past: The museum where history keeps repeating itself:
The easiest mistake to make in historical re-enactment is to create an era that never quite existed, by playing too closely to period. At Beamish, there is a real thoughtfulness given to how every age is a sort of palimpsest.
However, it doesn't appear that the author of this piece (known to me) has actually ridden in a sedan-chair (where would you get the bearers, even if a museum would let you try out one?): Jolted and Jumbled: Riding in a Sedan Chair in the 18th Century
***
And Dept, Here Comes the Silly Season:
This strikes me as in the fine old spirit of Stephen Potter and GamesManShip/LifeManShip etc: The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek: One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist bro:
My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of.... The game works best when you choose something that is normally the prompt for a great deal of intellectual posturing, of talking in a loud, bored voice.... Don’t do this to anyone who will be hurt by it, as opposed to merely irritated.
(I think Potter's 'plonking' could be invoked here perhaps.)
Whereas this has escaped from the era of Ealing Comedy, surely? Daniel Jackson was just 14 when he and his friends saw a strip of forest between Serbia and Croatia, and decided to claim it. Now 20, he is the president of Verdis, but has been forced to live in exile:
[I]t seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis’s citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but “it’s a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved”.
We wonder how many of that 30% of the citizenry are girlfriends who have been signed up to the project....
My shop is FULL!
Aug. 19th, 2025 02:54 amelisem Well, OK, it would still let me put up more things. But I have reached my goal of having 300 pieces in the shop for my birthday month sale. Whee! Here is the shop:
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise
300 pieces is a lot. It was a big goal. A very big goal. But I am there.
To celebrate, yes, I did put up one more piece. Its name is a line from a poem of mine. It can be seen here:
www.etsy.com/listing/4354661133/some-poems-are-strong-enough-to-bear
If you want to do something nice for my birthday, please point people at the sale, yes? It would be a great goodness. Also, there will be more markdowns coming, because you know how I get. <3
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise
300 pieces is a lot. It was a big goal. A very big goal. But I am there.
To celebrate, yes, I did put up one more piece. Its name is a line from a poem of mine. It can be seen here:
www.etsy.com/listing/4354661133/some-poems-are-strong-enough-to-bear
If you want to do something nice for my birthday, please point people at the sale, yes? It would be a great goodness. Also, there will be more markdowns coming, because you know how I get. <3
The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens
Aug. 18th, 2025 01:08 pmrachelmanija
13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.
Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...
...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?
Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.
Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.
But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.
The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!
The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.
The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.
Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.
(no subject)
Aug. 18th, 2025 01:32 pmskygiantsObviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.
Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.
Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear
Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it
Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.
Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.
Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear
Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it
Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.
rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.For people who like this sort of thing, this is what they like?
Aug. 18th, 2025 03:00 pmoursinThe Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist:
His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?
....
In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship.
Okay, I am jumping up and down going BURN! because one of the editors is someone who wrote a ghastly retro piece of work within my own Field of Endeavour which I had occasion to review back in the day.
(The Literary Review was kinder)
But also, while I guess Bensons are a minor fandom of mine, the diaries I would be interested in reading are those of Minnie (Sapphic romps at Lambeth Palace!) and of naughty Fred, EF Benson, author of the camp classics about Mapp and Lucia and the Edwardian bromance David Blaize. Though once attended conference paper claiming that the M&L novels were essentially romans a clef about his circle, so maybe he didn't need to write a bitchy diary as well.
I think we already had as much of AC as anyone would wish to know in that Goldhill volume on the family, which had a bit too much AC for my taste to begin with.
Culinary
Aug. 17th, 2025 06:39 pmoursinThis week's bread(as last week's developed mould): Len Deighton's Mixed Wholemeal from the Sunday Times Book of Real Bread, 4:1:1 wholemeal flour/strong white flour/mix of wheatgerm, bran, and pinhead oatmeal, splosh of sunflower oil rather than melted butter, rather nice.
Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, started out as 70/30% wholemeal spelt/einkorn flour but ended up more like 50/50%, maple syrup, ground ginger, quite good.
Today's lunch: diced casserole beef slow-cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and water with star anise, served with sticky rice with lime leaves, cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds, and sugar snap peas stirfried with garlic
Tiny House, Big Fix, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Aug. 16th, 2025 03:31 pmrachelmanija
Of the MANY bait-and-switch books I've been tricked into reading, this takes the prize for the biggest switch. The back cover says it's about a single mom carpenter who builds a tiny house for herself and her daughters to live in. The title is about tiny houses. There is a tiny house on the cover. I read the book because I thought it would be about building a tiny house.
The book is actually about the events leading up to her building the tiny house. She doesn't build the tiny house until the LAST CHAPTER. It takes up about four pages.
Extreme amounts of "fun"
Aug. 16th, 2025 01:12 pmazurelunaticThursday's appointment was one that I knew was going to stir up trauma. The doctor ended up listing that aspect of it as PTSD, which I guess is fair. I always have thought of it as "trauma" rather than PTSD, which is kind of odd in retrospect.
I wound up taking a small dose of my "street cred" when I realized I was starting to have a trauma response. That turned out to be a good idea. There's a follow up in a few months, and I should pre-medicate for it.
Afterwards I got the 32 oz reverse mocha from a local coffee shack. (Not one of the bikini coffee shacks.) With chocolate whipped cream, thank you very much. My first time encountering white coffee espresso in a drink. Interesting and almost floral. I had Belovedest (a bitter supertaster) try it. Still coffee tasting, but not as strongly.
Although that's also possibly due to me only having 3 shots of espresso in the drink instead of the usual 6.
I would much rather discuss the coffee than the source of the trauma and the appointment, in any event.
I wound up taking a small dose of my "street cred" when I realized I was starting to have a trauma response. That turned out to be a good idea. There's a follow up in a few months, and I should pre-medicate for it.
Afterwards I got the 32 oz reverse mocha from a local coffee shack. (Not one of the bikini coffee shacks.) With chocolate whipped cream, thank you very much. My first time encountering white coffee espresso in a drink. Interesting and almost floral. I had Belovedest (a bitter supertaster) try it. Still coffee tasting, but not as strongly.
Although that's also possibly due to me only having 3 shots of espresso in the drink instead of the usual 6.
I would much rather discuss the coffee than the source of the trauma and the appointment, in any event.
What even are past times?
Aug. 16th, 2025 04:16 pmoursinPassed by my skimming eye yesterday somebody commenting on how people are still unclear on the concepts of the Dark Ages/Medieval Times/Renaissance and what/when they were -
- and I was muttering to myself, huh, those were after all a longish time ago, people are unclear on THE VICTORIANS AND THEIR ERA which is really not that long ago -
- and then I thought, hang on, we do not even need to go that far back, have I not expatiated upon people going on about that lovely healthy food grandma used to cook -
That would be grandma living in the heyday of tinned food/convenience food etc etc, what is this pastoral myth you are propagating?
And then we get people trying to make excuses for living persons having Certain Opinions or Phrasing Things in Certain Ways and saying 'oh well, they were brung up in a different era'.
So was I, bozo, so was I, that era was the 60s/70s/80s and unless they were being brought up in entire seclusion as part of a mad scientist's experiment, I doubt they could have completely missed what was going on.
I'm boggling a little at this article about nostalgia for parenting and childhood in the 90s, because I bet in the 90s they were looking back to Some Earlier Era, and there were panics about Modern Childhood, and Meedja, and so on.
Trapped, by Michael Northrop
Aug. 15th, 2025 09:52 amrachelmanija
Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.
This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.
Why is this book so bad?
1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.
The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."
2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!
3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.
4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!
5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.
6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"
I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.
7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).
Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?
Spoilers! ( Read more... )
Truly terrible.
ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).