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Aug. 17th, 2025 09:42 pm[personal profile] neekabe
neekabe: Bucky from FatWS smiling (Default)
Updates

- Tooth repair was straightforward and didn't require any extra unpleasant needles.

- I got my latest keybaord! I'd been staring at the Ink Noir keycap set for a while, and Glorious got had a sale on, so I decided to bite the bullet. I think I might have finally found a switch set that's too heavy, but I'm waiting on it. I can always switch out the switches. I am quite an aggressive typer apparently. I'm also wondering how much of the excess in typos is because I haven't yet built the feet into the keyboard to make it a flat keyboard, instead of the weird illogical default angle that's supposed to be 'ergonomic'.

- We went on a family vacation at a rental cottage which was a lovely time around family. Good visits, good time just to hang out. I did pick up a bug from on the trip so I came home with something like strep. Then I got on penicillin and my eye really flared up to the point where I couldn't open my eyes (my left eye because it was painful, my right eye because I opening that eye meant my left eye moved).

It started improving when I stopped the meds. I got on something else and everything seems to be resolved now, both the throat and the eye. Still not quite sure what happened, I've never had problems with penicillin before.

Appointment for the eye is in two weeks so we'll see if that has any more information.

The summer went by quickly, but I'm looking forward to my schedule settling out again in the fall.

More Sewing!

Aug. 17th, 2025 06:27 pm[personal profile] forestofglory
forestofglory: patch work quilt featuring yellow 8 pointed stars on background of night sky fabrics (Quilt)
I have being doing a lot sewing projects recently so here are some more pictures:

ExpandRead more... )

WorldCon/Hugo Awards wrap up

Aug. 17th, 2025 05:29 pm[personal profile] muccamukk
muccamukk: Drawing of 13 floating in space outside the TARDIS. Her speech bubble is a heart. (DW: 13 Hearts Space)
After the 1030 panel on Thursday, all the streams worked fine! There was one room that was cursed, and the volume was often very low, but all of the others were great as long as the panellists used the mic, and some were on Zoom so people from other countries could attend. It looks like many of them will be re-playable, also, so I can check out panels I missed.

My sister-in-law came to stay with us so we could watch panels together. It's been really fun, and I'm glad we did it.

Some highlight panels were:
Worldbuilding Through Geography and Environments
with Martha Wells, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Nicola Griffith & Paolo Bacigalupi

Diasporic Caribbean Science Fiction
with E.G. Condé, Alex V Cruz, Fabrice Guerrier, Malka Older, Suzan Palumbo, Tonya Liburd, Tonya R. Moore & Premee Mohamed

Reading by Guest of Honor Martha Wells
with previews of both Queen Demon and the Murderbot coming out next year, plus a great Q&A.

Navigating AI as an Author or Editor
with Jason Sanford, Cassie Alexander, Dr. Corey Frazier, Emily M. Bender & Neil Clarke

Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon
with Isis Asare, Ada Palmer, Andrea Hairston, Annalee Newitz & Charlie Jane Anders

SFF's Role in Revolution on the African Continent
with Naomi Eselojor, Gabrielle Emem Harry, Khaya Maseko, Ngozi Anuoluwa, Nkereuwem Albert & Soila Kenya

Making It Gay… or Trans, Neurodivergent, BIPOC, and More
with Atlin Merrick, Clara Ward, Hana Lee, Maeve MacLysaght & Sarah Rees Brennan

Sifting Through History
with Remy Nakamura (M), Leigh Bardugo, Natania Barron, Nisi Shawl & Paul Weimer.

I didn't take notes on anything, but could relay any impressions I have, if people want?

I did at most 1/4 of the Hugo reading/watching, and then July was such a wash that I didn't even vote, but I was pretty happy with the results. The only category I was invested in was best series, and I was delighted that Rebecca Roanhorse won for Between Earth and Sky.

Otherwise: the novella I thought was the best of the bunch won, and the novel I hated lost. I'm still cross Blackheart man wasn't shortlisted, and the nomination stats aren't out yet, so I haven't seen how far down the list it was. I'm going to be even more cross if it was just one off, and Adrian Tchaikovsky getting two slots kept it out. (I always think it's nice when an established author who already has awards declines a spot if they have two titles in the same category, since that gives a new person a chance a lot of the time, but I'm less enamoured of the idea if it turns out that it's only women declining award nominations.)

I'm also very happy for Moniquill Blackgoose, who won the Astounding (not a Hugo), and Darcie Little Badger for her Lodestar (not a Hugo).

(no subject)

Aug. 17th, 2025 06:35 pm[personal profile] aurumcalendula
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
Joe Baby is now on Amazon. It's not a particularly good movie imho, but I liked Dichen Lachman in it and would love to see a followup of some sort with her in the same role.

Joe Baby kinda reminds me of Dex Parios and I'm kinda delighted that, going by the Goodreads blurb of the title in question, someone took a book with a male main character and decided to adapt so said character's a queer woman (going by the preview of the first four chapters, Heather Stanton in the movie is Cornell Stanton in the book, so it's possible the main character's also queer in the book but I don't feel like buying the ebook to find out).

weeknotes (august 10-16, 2025)

Aug. 17th, 2025 11:57 am[personal profile] tozka
tozka: title character sitting with a friend (lady lovely locks & friends)

Life Updates

I’ve been so enjoying my time in Ann Arbor– or at least in this part of A2 in particular.

Every morning I wake up around 6, make a cup of coffee and go out to sit in the garden for an hour or two. Then, after feeding the cats, I go walk around the neighborhood for as long as I want, usually 40 minutes, come back and shower and then get to work! I sit at a high desk and watch the garden out the window, and I see all sorts of animals: groundhogs, rabbits, squirrels (three kinds), chipmunks, stray cats, and once even a deer!

The week has fairly raced by! I did make it into town once this week, to check out the farmer’s market and a few shops. I stopped at a used bookstore called Digger’s, where you literally dig around for media (books, DVDs, games, CDs), and managed to find four books for $0.75/each. Now I’m REALLY in trouble, between those and the ones I got from the Little Free Libraries earlier– and did I mention I found an UNLICENSED LFL on a walk the other day? Of course I got a book from there, so now I’m up to (I think) 10 books still waiting to be read.

ExpandRead the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

📸 photo: oak tree

Aug. 17th, 2025 11:21 am[personal profile] tozka
tozka: A bit of green landscape against a riotous blue cloud-filled sky (van gogh landscape)
Looking upwards from the ground into the branches of a very large tree. The branches spread across the screen in a curve and are filled with leaves. The sun is shining through the leaves and highlighting those while the rest are a darker green in shadow.

This is (I think) a burr oak tree! Which is the “arbor” part of Ann Arbor (the other being the names of the two founders’ wives, who were both called Ann).

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

Culinary

Aug. 17th, 2025 06:39 pm[personal profile] oursin
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)

This 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

(no subject)

Aug. 17th, 2025 12:45 pm[personal profile] oursin
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] negothick and [personal profile] quiara!

Worldcon Report: Saturday

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:36 pm[personal profile] owlmoose
owlmoose: (book - key)

I started the day with a crumpet and shopping at Pike Place Market, then headed over to the con, where I attended a panel and three readings.

  • A panel on writing for corporate IP with Rebecca Roanhorse, G. Willow Wilson, and Diana Ma (with whom I wasn't familiar; she's written various works for hire, most notably Power Rangers). It was an interesting conversation about the upsides and downsides of working in other people's sandboxes.
  • First reading: Fonda Lee, who read from a forthcoming sci-fi novel about warriors who are essentially samurai who work for multi-planetary corporations.
  • Second reading: Rebecca Roanhorse, who read a bit of her breakthrough short story ("Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience", which won a Hugo some years back), a bit of the third book in her epic fantasy series Between Earth and Sky, and a bit of a forthcoming story set in The Sixth World. I would note that in both her panel and her reading, she mentioned being a Hugo finalist for Best Series but disclaimed any expection that she might win, which made what happened at the ceremony tonight even more exciting.
  • Third reading: Marie Brennan, who read a short story that came out a year or two ago. It was a good story, but particularly interesting because it was originally going to be a fantasy trilogy. But for various reasons, she never wrote those books, and eventually she decided the big concept -- a revolutionary who decides the figurehead of the revolution needs to be assassinated -- could be told in short form.
  • And then of course the Hugos. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't vote this year because I wasn't engaged reading, watching, or critical analysis at all this cycle, but I still wanted to watch the ceremony. Lots of surprise winners -- at least, surprises to my circle, and also apparently to Rebecca Roanhorse herself in the case of Best Series. Some high points: Abigail Nussbaum on the importance of critics to fandom, Diana Pho's call to stand up to fascism, and Roanhorse and Lodestar winner Darcie Little Badger on the need for diverse voices in fiction. (Have multiple indigenous people ever won Hugos in the same year before?) The ceremony was okay, some hiccups in production -- particularly the lack of pronunciation guides. Worldcon also needs to decide once and for all how to handle nominees with large production teams, because long lists of participants are still getting laughs in the room, which I don't feel great about.

The con continues into tomorrow, but I'm taking off in the morning to move into the second phase of this vacation: an Oregon coast road trip with some friends who are flying into Portland tomorrow and Monday. So I say goodbye to con space for now, and consider whether I'll go to Los Angeles next year.

rachelmanija: (Books: old)


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.

kitty!

Aug. 16th, 2025 03:54 pm[personal profile] watersword
watersword: a tabby cat peering over a book at the reader (Cat: Gherkin)

So it turns out that K.J. Parker and K.J. Charles are totally different people, albeit both writers. Who knew? NOT ME. I now have K.J. Parker's Sixteen ways to defend a walled city on hold at the library.

Managed to restrain myself at the farmer's market this morning, only getting three kinds of plums (I planned on two), some salad mix, a sourdough loaf ... and a chocolate croissant.

And then almost as soon as I came home, a friend called to say that she was downstairs, with her kid, and a stray cat they had found outside, was I home and did I have a carrier and treats to coax the cat into a carrier? The answer, of course, was yes, and we spent a little while trying to get a gorgeous little smokey-grey creature into my carrier, eventually wrestling her in after bribery with Churu did not work. She was mostly very well-mannered, clearly accustomed to humans, if unsure about these strangers (including the smallest one without volume modulation), and frankly the gherkin is more ruthless with her teeth and claws when I want her to be in the carrier and she wants to fuck me up. She has been taken to the ASPCA, where they confirmed she has a chip and they are trying to get in touch with her humans; in the meanwhile, she is staying with a friend who has a spare room.

a first ball of yarn

Aug. 16th, 2025 01:00 pm[personal profile] yhlee
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)


It's wildly inconsistent (wool/sari silk waste blend, about 30 g / 1.2 oz) and I struggled with the learning curve for plying (first on a Turkish spindle that was too small for plying, then on the wheel once I figured out how to adjust the takeup; mine uses scotch tension) but hey, it exists!

I remain desperately curious about the mordant because I soaked yarn in hot water for an hour and the water ran completely clear, and it's a red dye!

But as therapeutic activities (quite literally this doubles as physical therapy for my wrecked ankles, and I'm still sick), this is very satisfying.

What even are past times?

Aug. 16th, 2025 04:16 pm[personal profile] oursin
oursin: Painting of Clio Muse of History by Artemisia Gentileschi (Clio)

Passed 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.

Books read, early August

Aug. 16th, 2025 09:03 am[personal profile] mrissa
mrissa: (Default)
 

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky. This is the latest of the Rivers of London series, with both Peter and Abigail getting point of view in alternating chapters. If you're enjoying that series so far, rejoice, here's another. And it's up in Scotland, which was good for me because further north and may be good for you because variation in setting. Do I feel like this is one that moved the arc plot forward immensely? No, I really don't, this is one where he wanted to let the characters do some things. And they did. Okay.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. The jarring thing about this book is that it reads exactly like the essays I'm reading about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. in New York Review of Books (and, to a lesser extent, London Review of Books) in terms of tone. Occasionally that's comprehensible because some of those essays are still being written by Timothy Garton Ash. Sometimes it's just a boggling moment of "oh gosh it's been like that the whole time."

Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. When you were a teenager, did you have a friend whose father insisted that everything of note had been invented by his own ethnicity? And would occasionally pop up while you and your friend were in the kitchen getting a snack to give you another example? I have seen this with Irish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Italian dads, and there may have been more I'm not remembering. Well, I don't think Mr. Beckwith is actually Scythian (...some of the dads in question were not actually their thing either), but other than that, it's just like that. And the thing is, he might be right about some of it. He certainly seems to be right that taking a contradictory and known hostile account as our main source about an entire culture is not a grand plan. It's just that I feel like I want more information about whether, for example, the entire field of philosophy from Greece to China was actually invented by Scythians, whether most reputable scholars would agree with his theories that Lao Tzu and the Buddha were both meaningfully Scythian, etc. But gosh it sure was something to read.

Ingvild Bjerkeland, Beasts. One of the questions that arises with literature in translation is how unusual a particular shape of narrative is in its original. Because in English, this is a very, very standard post-apocalyptic narrative of two siblings' survival. Is it similarly standard in Norwegian? I don't know. Possibly I don't know yet. Anyway, it was reasonably pleasant to read and short, if you're looking for that sort of thing, but for me it doesn't have a particularly fresh take on the tropes involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox. Kindle. Penric's children are growing up. He's not that thrilled. Having to deal with a possessed ox does not help matters. I wouldn't start here, because I think it leans on having a sense of Penric and Desdemona from the previous volumes, which are luckily all still available.

Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore. Discussed elsewhere.

A.R. Capetta, Costumes for Time Travelers. This is a cozy that is actually cozy for me as a reader! Gosh. That rarely happens. I think part of the strength here is brevity: at 200 pages, it's only trying to do some things, not everything, which gives me fewer loose...uh...threads. So to speak. But also Capetta is quite good at focusing my attention on the stuff they care about, which is a major skill in prose. And: time travelers! getting clothes from somewhere specific! Fun times! I will probably give this as a gift more than once this year.

P.F. Chisholm, A Clash of Spheres. This is a case where I am really frustrated not to have the next one RIGHT NOW, but I generally don't do that (more on why in a minute). It's very much more in the land of politics than of mystery per se, but a good Elizabethan era [Scottish/English] Border politics novel, much enjoyed, last line cliffhanger aaaaagh. (It is also book 8 in its series. Don't start here. Chisholm expects that you will know various things about the characters and setting and care proportionately, and I'm glad she does, it works for me...but I've read all the preceding books. I recommend that.)

Emma Flint, Other Women. So...I'm part of the problem here. I know it. I talk a good game about how evil is largely extremely mundane and unglamorous, and how we really need to think about whether the way we portray villainy in fiction is fueling unproductive assumptions about some of our moral opponents being geniuses when some of them are in fact very venial, grubby, and straightforward. Well. This is a book with two narrators united by one man, and that man is one of the most banal villains in all of fiction. The only reason he can charm anyone is 1) extreme good looks, but as this is prose, you will have to be willing to imagine that yourself for it to work; 2) they are very very vulnerable. They are desperate. This is a book about the "extraneous" women of the 1920s, after the mass male casualty event that was the Great War, and how vulnerable such women could be, particularly with the gender norms and assumptions of the time. It is based on a true story. Its prose is reasonably well done. Also I did not enjoy reading it and do not recommend it, because "Look, isn't he gross? but basically very mundane?" is not something I like spending a whole book with. So I continue to be part of the problem, and I continue to think about what to do about that, but in the meantime, meh, still not thrilled with this book.

Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal. Absolutely a straightforward book about democratic norms and practices in Senegal and how it is similar to and different from other countries in the region, how it is influenced by France and how not. Absolutely the book it's claiming to be.

Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear. This is why I don't put the next book in a series on my wish list until I've read the preceding one: because sometimes I will just be D-O-N-E after the mess an author makes of a book in a series I've previously enjoyed. This book was published less than a decade ago, which is far, far too recent for not one of the investigators to run into a person they have identified with one birth gender IDed as another gender and have nobody say, "Oh, well, what if they're trans." The response instead is not overtly transphobic but is kind of a disaster both in terms of handling of gender and in terms of the logistics of the actual murder mystery at hand. Not recommended, and it's killed my interest in the rest of the series.

Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Definitely not what it says on the tin. This is instead an attempt to wade through and adjudicate the effects of a single outsized personality on the field of stream restoration. Which was sort of interesting as a case study, and it's short, but also I was hoping for stream restoration. Oh well, I have another book to try for that.

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal: A Travelers' Portrait. In this one, on the other hand, you'll never guess what they did. That's right: they sure did go to Portugal. This is a very weird book, a giant compendium of short accounts of British people who went to Portugal for various reasons (grouped by reason). I like Rose Macaulay a great deal better than the average person on the street, but this is not the good end of her prose, including paragraphs that stretched for more than three pages at a go. If you want to know things about Portugal, go elsewhere unless it's super specific stuff about really obscure British travelers. If you're a Rose Macaulay completist, come sit by me, and we can sigh in mild frustration over this book. If you're not in either of those categories, this is definitely not for you.

Alastair Reynolds, The Dagger in Vichy. Kindle. This is tonally different from the other mid-far future stuff Reynolds has been doing, and I'm here for it; I like to see people branch out a bit. I don't know whether he's been reading some of the same historical mysteries as I have, but I ponder the question not because I feel like anything is derivative but because some of the same interesting ideas may have come into play. In any case, this is short and fun and I like it.

Nicole C. Rust, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders--And How We Can Change That. This is also short and fun and I like it. Okay, maybe brain disorders are not an entirely standard shape of fun. But Rust is very thoughtful about what hasn't been working and what has/might, in this field, and her prose is very clear, and I recommend this if you're at all interested.

Vikram Seth, The Humble Administrator's Garden. Kindle. There's a groundedness to these poems that I really like. They have a breadth of setting but a commonality in their human specificity.

Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Miss Plum and Miss Penny. I'm afraid the comedy of this light 20th century novel did not hit particularly well for me. It didn't offend--there were not racial jokes, for example--but it was just sort of. Not hilarious. It's the story of a middle-aged woman who takes in a younger woman in need, is rightfully much annoyed by her, and learns to appreciate her own life a lot more thereby. I'm not offended by this book. I just don't have any particular reason to recommend it.

Sonia Sulaiman, ed., Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction. I really like that there is a wide variety of tone, emotion, speculative conceit, and relationship with Palestine here. As with most anthologies, some stories were more my jam than others, but I'm really glad this is here for me to find out.

Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman. A friend recently told me that this is the open pseudonym of Sarah Zettel, whose science fiction and fantasy I have enjoyed. This is one of her Regency mysteries--I understand she also writes romances under this name but I found the distinction to be clearly labeled, hurrah. Anyway this is just what you would want in a Regency mystery, good prose, froth and sharpness balanced, good times, glad there are more.

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128. Flooding and river course changes! Environmental devastation and famine! References to James C. Scott in the analysis of how the imperial government handled it! Absolutely this is my jam. It's a very specific work, so I can't say that everyone should read this, but I never say that anyway, people vary. But if you have an interest in Chinese environmental history, or in fact in environmental history in general, you'll be pleased with this one.

(no subject)

Aug. 16th, 2025 12:19 pm[personal profile] oursin
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] qilora!
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
It annoys me very much that Alexander Knox's The Closing Door (1949) performed so dismally on Broadway that it never had a chance at a film option, since it would have made a neat little semi-noir addition to the catalogue of mid-century cinema that isn't totally pants about mental illness. Psychiatrically it suffers from the inevitably explanatory trauma and narratively from the climactic restatement of the moral that any audience with half an attention will have gathered for themselves, but not more so than some similarly oriented narratives from its era and certainly less than many. Otherwise and the critics who were bored by it can bite me, its representation of mental illness is remarkable for its ordinariness. Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what and whose ability to hold a job, never fabulous, has deteriorated to the point where he's lied for a month about losing the last one so as not to feel any more of a failure in front of his family than he has for years. He has some odd, jerky triggers, decisions easily overwhelm him, he can tell it's bad when stumbling into his son's photo-finish camera-flash leaves him in the childish pain of a nightmare. "I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." He's so terrified of being institutionalized that it makes even setting up an outpatient evaluation a minefield, which per the author's note is much of the social message even without the half of the family that views treatment as a more brazen stigma of lunacy than genteelly hushing the whole thing up. It has a more uncertainly open ending, but the frustrated insistence that mental illnesses should be regarded no more sensationally than physical ones reminded me directly and surprisingly of The October Man (1947), still my gold standard for the subject in its decade. At least on the page, it should not have been a two-week flop. It is never so much of a sociological treatise that it doesn't function as a character study; it doesn't need to be tricky to be tense because the stakes of sanity and autonomy are high enough. Knox wrote the central couple of Vail and Norma Trahern for himself and his wife Doris Nolan and while I am unfairly ill-equipped to imagine her performance, having seen her only as the chic deep freeze of Holiday (1938), he should have been very good as the disconnected, not inhuman Vail. I have not been able to find more of a visual record than the production stills accompanying the published text, which after years of just about every playscript or screenplay of interest to me turning out to be inaccessibly stashed in universities or special collections, I was genuinely shocked to find reproduced in full in the May 1950 Theatre Arts. The sparsely furnished loft which post-war signals the Traherns' poverty—accessible by service elevator, its wall of a studio window overlooking the surrounding roofs with their night-flashing signs—would have gentrified into the millions these days.

It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.

In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.
owlmoose: (quote - eliot hollow men)

Hello from Seattle! I left home on Wednesday morning and got as far as Salem, OR (about an hour south of Portland). Arrived in Seattle around 3pm on Thursday, checked into the hotel, got my con badge, and did a quick spin around the dealer's room (where I ran into [personal profile] zahraa) before heading off to Writers with Drinks, an amazing reading featuring Cecelia Tan, Andrea Hairston, Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, Darcie Little Badger, and Becky Chambers. All the readers were excellent, and Charlie Jane provided them all with hilarious and extravagant fictional introductions, including herself. I think it's fair to say that this was the con-related event I was most excited to attend, and it lived up to my expectations.

I had half-planned to spend this morning at Pike Place Market, but it started raining last night and hasn't really let up, so I took it easy instead, visiting the art show and dealers room and then attending a few panels:

  • Martha Wells guest of honor reading, where she started with a passage from Queen Demon, the forthcoming book in her current fantasy series, and then answered some questions before rounding it out with her in-progress Murderbot story, which is scheduled for next May.
  • A panel called A Genre in Conversation with Itself, which is about the phenomenon of SFF authors writing stories in response to other stories. I picked this one mostly because of the panelists: Neil Clarke (editor of Clarksworld magazine), Becky Chambers, John Scalzi, Isabel Kim (the author of a Hugo-nominated short story that was a response to "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas")... and George R. R. Martin. Therefore, it was going to be a fascinating conversation and/or a train wreck, and either way I wanted to see it for myself. GRRM was almost 15 minutes late, complained a lot about film adaptations of books (Starship Troopers was a particular focus of his ire), and mourned the impulse to rewrite "The Cold Equations" with "a happy ending". Fortunately, other members of the panel managed to pull the panel back on topic and to talk about things less than 30 years old. The two insights I most appreciated came from Becky Chambers. First, she mentioned that Omelas and "The Cold Equations" are both stories taught in high school or college now, so lots of people have read them, and that explains not just the fact of many response stories but that they tend to come in waves, as each new generation of writers comes into their careers. The other was to note that a lot of "response fic" is appearing in the form of video games -- she specifically mentioned Clair Obscur as a response to the Final Fantasy series, which immediately added it to my to-play list.
  • More Martha Wells content: a live recording of the podcast Ink to Film, in which an author and a filmmaker read a book, then discuss its film adaptation. They also sometimes interview creators, and today they talked to her about Murderbot. They opened with a lovely series of videos from the show's main cast sharing their love and congratulations with Martha, then discussed the process of writing the books, optioning the story to filmmakers, and then creating the show. Although Wells wasn't directly involved with making the adaptation choices or writing the screenplays (although she did read all the screenplays and provide feedback), she got to choose between several teams who wanted to buy the option, and she was able to pick the people she felt most understood the character and the story she was telling. When we got to Q&A, she had to demur on almost every question about why specific changes were made: "You'd have to ask Phil and Chris; that was all Phil and Chris." That said, she seems extremely happy with the final product, which is great to hear (especially since I, too, loved that TV series a lot).

I then spent the rest of the evening with friends: dinner with illustratedpage and her friend (who was a surprise!Mawrter) followed by an hour at a local cat cafe with bookishdi, both lovely and relaxing times.

Tomorrow: Pike Place, several readings, and the Hugo Awards, god help us all.

unhinged spinning

Aug. 15th, 2025 10:48 pm[personal profile] yhlee
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
Unhinged spinning experiment: Immolation Fox prototype #1 (WIP)



Close-up:



(This is a WIP single, which I'd plan to ply, so that's active twist right now.)

I'm resigned at this point to destroying fiber in the service of something I find personally delightful to spin but Shinjo only knows how I'm going to get rid of the resulting yarn since I don't knit or crochet and don't plan to start. I took it up as an extremely backhanded way of additional physical therapy for my ankles.

If I am scarce right now, I'm physically ill, sorry! Spinning is at least a different sickness distraction from Balatro, which eats my device batteries.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott:

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To Embers We Return by Ning Yuan (translated by Douqi):

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tozka: (spring comes)
Close-up of several purple puffball looking flowers, with a bee hunting for pollen in the middle

Wikipedia: Mouse Garlic (the variety of allium Pl@ntNet thinks this looks closest to)

Allium angulosum is a perennial herb up to 50 cm tall. Bulbs are narrow and elongated, about 5 mm in diameter. The plant produces a hemispherical umbel of small pink flowers on long pedicels.

Adding two new words to my dictionary, one sec…

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

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