Rosebriars and ink

A People’s Future of the United States looks great. John Joseph Adams tends to be a pretty great editor (Press Start To Play notwithstanding, and I think that had a coeditor). Some names I recognize in the TOC, some I don't.

How to Handle the Baron Harkonnen in a Modern Dune Adaptation at Tor.com--I loved Dune dearly as a teenager and also have spent a lot of time daydreaming about antigravity bras inspired by Baron Harkonnen's suspensors, so I'm interested to see how this will be worked out. (Not to say that I'm definitely going to see the movie, because I see very few movies, and odds are pretty good that I will not. I frequently manage not to watch even things I'm actively interested in, let alone things I'm leery about. I find visual media really stressful, even more than I find anything with a plot I don't already know stressful. Harry Potter fanfic is the only thing with high-stakes plots I can reliably consume without giving myself an anxiety attack, and even with that I'm frequently rereading fics I've read before.)

Why Can’t We Have Decent Toilet Stalls? via umadoshi raises an excellent point. Also, informs me that apparently in Europe loads of public bathrooms have floor to ceiling stall walls. Why must we live in this hell. And it can't just be a cost thing, the bathrooms in one of the buildings on campus have stall walls of solid granite, giant expensive slabs of stone, and they're the same foot off the ground shit as everything else. (Also, the automatic paper towel machines in those bathrooms are basically always out of order.)

Dear Pedants: Your Fave Grammar Rule is Probably Fake via umadoshi is a great article about why so much of grammar prescriptivism is arrant nonsense. I like the phrase "Make-Believe Grammar".

'Bizarro World': That's what my wife and I entered when we drove up to an arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, where she would attempt to break an official world record in the classic video game Tetris. Oddly fascinating piece about a world record in Tetris being broken by a reporter's wife who had no idea she was world-class good.

Le Beau Monde Tarot looks visually neat, but also not very usable as an actual deck to me, at least not within my preferred deck style.

I've also been reading a ton of twitter hashtag #CopyPasteCris about the latest plagiarism scandal and associated material. Here's the first post from Courtney Milan and her followup, the post at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and the post at Pajiba. Courtney Milan has also tweeted that no less than three ghostwriters have contacted her saying that Cristiane hired or attempted to hire them for help 'fleshing out a book' that was a collection of disconnected scenes they now presume were plagiarized, implying that her modus operandi is to scrape shit out of as many books as possible, dump it in a file, and then pay someone a pittance--or attempt to not pay them even that--to connect the dots. One of the twitter threads on the subject.

I continue to have this issue where if Koschei is behind blinds/curtain and I can only see his silhouette, I parse him as being Bluebell.

I miss her so much. I want to know what she would have thought of him, if they could have gotten along.

Cleo's started almost trying to play with him, which is particularly impressive because Cleo doesn't play. Like, at all, ever, she doesn't interact with toys, our dog has no hobbies and we fret about it sometimes. But today she's been dancing at him. I hope they figure out how to be friends and not just peacefully coexisting, even as novel as it is to have animals that peacefully coexist instead of a 15-year cold war over my person. (Tabby and Bluebell were sisters and they nevertheless hated each other violently and couldn't be in the same room at the same time.)

Mildly irritated that chrome is willing to autofill 'linkspam' as a title but not 'linkdump', which I have used more times. Autofill is an arcane mystery.

Markdown Simplifies Formatting Your DW Posts--the only thing I have trouble remembering how to do in HTML is username links, so maybe I'll try markdown for that? Otherwise I just don't want to be bothered having to remember another type of formatting mostly. I know how to code a link in html! I sincerely doubt I can reliably remember how to do so in markdown. (I am notably terrible at remembering how to do things involving text commands, it's a large part of why I stopped using linux. GUIs are my friends. My DW posts I code the links and italics and bold manually, because that's something I can reliably remember, but I use the rich text editor to inset images because I can never remember how to code in the width restrictions, and also to include username links because how to do it just keeps falling out of my head.) Anyway, this being a 'silent feature' seems kinda... hm. Why do you have a formatting method that you have to hear about by word of mouth, that's weirdly exclusionary. I'd actually been looking for a page on what markdown DW supports because my friend lethe mentioned she thought it was supported, and I straight up could not find one or even any indication that it was supported. I mean, maybe I'm just bad at google now, but... nothing on the new post page itself mentions the feature or links to a page on being able to use the feature, soooo. Hm.

A lovely post about Buttercup (of The Princess Bride) as a poet, and how it improves the story

A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions is a disturbing investigation into an author who apparently lies constantly, about everything, and typing this has made my brain start playing why the fuck you lyin, why you always lyin, mmmm oh my god, stop fuckin lyin! Anyway this Dan Mallory dude sounds fuuuucking terrifying. Also, the fake emails from his "brother" about him being in hospital are so... this is a dude who would have stirred up drama and pseucided on lj, except he somehow managed to make masses of money doing it. Yikes. God, this story just keeps GOING. Also like, wow, this dude's novel was bought by the publishing house at whish he worked--I wonder just how much promotion money was poured into that book and how much that affected its #1 debut. Or if he pulled a more competent version of the Handbook for Mortals NYT scam--he's certainly got the money for it, christ.

via hellofriendsiminthedark, Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People is an interesting article about terrible translation attempts. ("It translates the alphabet!" Oh my god do you have any idea how slow and annoying it would be to fingerspell everything you wanted to say. No one talks like that.) (Reference point: I've taken ASL 1 and ASL 2; Alex, my housemate and best friend, is in the third year of a degree in ASL/English interpreting. I've gone to a fair few interpreting social events with him, even though my sign is pretty rudimentary.)

Hunger Makes Me, on women being expected to want nothing

On Fandom and the "culture of selling"--money quote, which I read aloud to Alex: If you look at the proliferation of gofundmes and patreons and think, "ugh, why do people keep asking me for money?" and not "how can we burn late capitalism to the ground and salt the remains?" then I think you're not seeing the big picture.

Misc

I found Knife Fights, Lockpicking, and Other Things I’ve Done to Become a Better Writer kind of tritely written, disappointingly lacking in knife fights, and weirdly unaware of the fact that genres other than 'thriller' exist. (Also, I feel like she probably would have been better served talking to an actual blind person who uses a cane than trying it herself for a couple of hours, because there's no way she learned all the nuances of the experience. And/or hiring a sensitivity reader. Maybe/hopefully she did that in addition to buying a cane?) Seriously though, "I've...taken classes in...knife fighting" being the entire description of that was not a good payoff for that title.

How Math Can Be Racist: Giraffing is a good post about the problems with algorithms, particularly the giraffe one that I'm familiar with from Janelle Shane's work with neural nets.

Myths Made Modern: Announcing The Mythic Dream, a New Anthology from the Creators of The Starlit Wood--Ghat damn, that TOC. John Chu, Amal El-Mohtar, T. Kingfisher, Arkady Martine, Seanan McGuire, Rebecca Roanhorse, Alyssa Wong... just absolutely jam packed with amazing talent. Definitely looking forward to that.

“The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show” — Revealing T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones--Honestly I hate comp titles, the x meets y description doesn't interest me at all, but it's by Ursula Vernon and it's her first official horror novel (rather than 'I was trying to write middle grade and my agent was like 'ursula this is not a children's book it's terrifying'') so I'm interested in it anyway. I wish I could read the text on the cover properly--AND TWISTED MYSELF ABOUT LIKE THE TWISTED ONES, I think? Probably-'about' has the lowest contrast and I'm most unsure of it. I'm also pretty certain that Alex will be into this, as he also loves Ursula Vernon and he's way more into horror in general than I am. (I have anxiety! Most horror just fuels it! Except some weirdly defined subset of creepy stuff that I love ardently and he doesn't like, for some reason. First day, they come and catch everyone. Second day, they beat us, and eat some for meat. ANYWAY, the point here is not the time I didn't sleep for two days because he talked me into watching Grave Encounters.) Cassandra Khaw says it made her "physically leap away from [her] Kindle in terror", so that's an... exciting review. Note to self: Read this in the morning and plan to watch disney movies or something afterward. And be prepared for the possibility of needing to put on simultaneous ghibli and bubblegum pop while reading. (I have Horror Coping Mechanisms.)

A great discussion about the drawbacks of federated fandom at sciatrix's dw, with lines drawn to dysfunctional forum culture.

Fanfic

Slowly picking at Benefits of Old Laws still, I've been seized by an extended fit of ennui and haven't been reading much. (Mostly I've been sulking about how I can't convince my brain to be interested in anything.)

Profic

Birthday Girl at Uncanny Magazine--content warnings for suicide, and abuse based on mental illnesses, including institutionalization, of children. Quietly brutal. Unusual formatting helps make it kind of dream-like. Or nightmare-like.

Tor.com's January-February Short Fiction Newsletter has a great new story from John Chu, the author of the fantastic The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere! Warning for abusive sibling. On a happier note, it's queer! I haven't read the others yet.

Reread What Gentle Women Dare at Uncanny Magazine from a link on twitter, which I opened without remembering I'd read it before. I don't... know that I actually like it much or indeed at all. It's bleak and brutal and full of sexual violence and dead children. None of which are things I enjoy reading! Compelling, well crafted, I just... don't enjoy the experience.

His owner had in fact moved and not updated his tags, he lives literally one street away. He is supposed to be outside in general but was supposed to have gone inside last night, the owner was grateful I took him inside out of the cold. I let him back out and he headed off in the correct direction.

(I feel like this dude needs to consider that this is a more dangerous area to let your cat outside in than [small town 40 minutes away], we're right off a major road and there's a colony of ferals down the street, but in the end it's not my cat and not my decision. My cat stays inside (and his late sisters always stayed inside) and always will, I will never have an outdoor cat.)

The Tessera Oracle newsletter emailed me about a new tile being released. Time to gaze wistfully at what I absolutely cannot afford but want desperately again. 190 CAD for the full set T_T

So beautiful, so unattainable

(to be fair, it's not like I've even been managing to use any of my (less expensive) tarot decks since my medication situation went to hell. Slow Holler tarot just sitting in a box. and dust on my altar.)

Via cupcake_goth, a getting-to-know-me meme, because why not.

The most notable aspect of my bag is the outside, which is covered in enamel pins and other stuff, like medallions from the webcomic Skin Deep by Kory Bing.


( Portrait oriented and thus kinda tall pictures of my bag )



Inside the bag are many things, because it is large.

Pocket with medallions: Hand sanitizer; tiny tub of Vaseline; both a stick and a tub of Vanillary perfume from Lush; a stick of Hot Southern Mess perfume from Bathhouse; Blistex medicated mint; Burt's Bees lip shimmers in Papaya and Cherry; Burt's Bees tinted lip balm in Hibiscus, Red Dahlia, and Rose.

Pocket with saguaro and cow skull: A woven rainbow bracelet, a tiny notebook with peacocks on the covers and random flowers pressed between the pages (which are terrible for pressed flowers because they're printed with an all-over design in slick magazine-type ink), a (micro? mini? I can never remember which is which, the one that came out on top) USB cable, an iphone lightning cable, a car charger-USB adapter, a wall plug-USB adapter, a spare battery/charger, a charger for my fitbit, and a 64gb flash drive that would have blown my everloving mind in middle school when I got my very first 512mb flash drive.

Pocket on the inside back of the bag: Just a packet of tissues and a glasses-cleaning cloth, anything in it presses against my back so it's not really usable.

Pocket 1 on the inside front of the bag: A large pencil eraser, two nail files, three pens from my mom's work (one of which I keep forgetting to give to Alex), two cheap mechanical pencils, three miscellaneous ballpoint pens (acroball black, uniball signo black, and an ultra fine point purple pilot), a mini screwdriver with interchangeable heads, a green mini sharpie, and a doll arm.

Pocket 2 on the inside front of the bag: Another USB cable, a spare wristband for my fitbit, a little plastic case with emergency tampons in it, a lanyard with my university ID, and a small black leather change purse with earplugs in it.

Main body of the bag: Cloth pouch (goldenrod with flowers), cloth pouch (salmon with flowers), cloth pouch (white with butterflies), hairbrush, deodorant, a paracord sling (like, as in David and Goliath) Alex made, an old pill bottle full of most of my earrings, an old pill bottle full of miscellaneous interesting small items like keys I found on the ground and an acorn and an enamel pin that broke off my bag, a little 2019 calendar from my mom's work, a black notebook I was triyng to bullet journal in, a wood-patterned notebook, and a bluetooth keyboard.

Connected to loops of bias tape sewn into the seams by carabiners: Tiny Totoro pouch (containing spare picking pin backs), wallet that is technically a clutch purse, ring of hairties, housekey, charm knotted for me by my dear friend Jared (which there are supposed to be two of, but one went missing in my last migration between bags).

Goldenrod pouch: A plastic fork, two pairs of latex gloves, and a rubber charm of the gijinka of the king from Hatoful Boyfriend Holiday Star.

Salmon pouch: More earplugs, some wet wipes I'm pretty sure I nicked from Ghengis Grill, A+D ointment, neosporin, another glasses cleaning cloth, some folded ziplock bags, and the backing card from my Certified Multishipper pin.

Butterfly pouch: Off brand pepto bismol pills, painkillers, benadryl, anxiety medication, those terrible earbuds in the little square plastic thing that come with iphones, a lot of packets of lactaid, a couple cough drops, a single packet of off-brand dayquil pills, a retractable sewing tape measure, and a folding knife.

My philosophy is to be PREPARED FOR ANYTHING. I've got another external battery I need to charge and stick back in my bag, and a second pair of shitty iphone earbuds I need to put back in their case and back in the bag. I also need to put back in a couple of the bandanas I took out to wash, because you never know when you'll need a bandana. And there are two other pocketknives that normally live in there but I took out to fly to see my family over Christmas and haven't put back yet. Sometimes I have a double-walled steel waterbottle in it too, or a knitted hat, or a cheap infinity scarf. (Also, it's full of smaller bags so I can literally ever find anything.)

On Resistance: The Chosen One at Strange Horizons, on the whitewashed, exceptionalized narrative of the Chosen One and its contrast to the hard, community-based work of a real resistance.

The myth of 'We don't build houses like we used to' by McMansion Hell is a nice down to earth look at the history of how everyday houses are built and why they're built that way.

Are These Bad habits Creeping Into Your Writing? I don't agree with all of this, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. I get the impression the author works with mainly literary fiction. It's rather fascinating to see an active reccomendation to use more epithets, coming from a fanfic context where the prevailing mode of thought is an absolute horror of them as unquestionably bad writing. (I think epithets have their place, for the record. My main problem with them is when people use OOC ones in work with a clear narrator--like, Harry Potter is not going to think of himself as 'the green-eyed teen' or 'the ravenette' (gods save us all from 'the [color]ette') or, I dunno, Daphne Greengrass as 'the statuesque blonde'. If you're going to use an epithet, make it a description your POV character would plausibly think about the character in question in the context in question.)

Why We Need The Serial Comma: 10 Hilarious Real-World Examples has, as it says, some amusing examples of sentences that desperately need clarifying commas in their lists. It has well known classics like 'my parents, Ayn Rand and God' and 'Nelson Mandela, an 800-year old demigod and a dildo collector' and some fun ones I hadn't seen before.

I listened to a few episodes of the Farm to Taber podcast and learned a lot about the state of modern agriculture and how incredibly bad America is at growing food on a fundamental level. Very interesting, and made my decision to make new FFN and AO3 accounts to subscribe to all 1000+ WIPs I have downloaded much less unbearably tedious. (It took nearly two hours. I listened to episodes 1, 2, 3, 10, and half of 7. I can't tell whether I listened to 9 and accidentally restarted it, or if I started it and then changed my mind and switched to a different one.)

Wobbly Poets: Joe Hill, Signe Aurell, and Scandinavian-American Laborlore - #FolkloreThursday is an interesting piece about 'laborlore', and I couldn't go through it reading about the late great Joe Hill without listening to something by or about him, which ended up being Leslie Fish's fantastic recording of his song The Preacher and the Slave from her great album It's Sister Jenny's Turn to Throw the Bomb, which includes such other Wobbly classics as We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years. Also Trinity, which is on a similar theme to The Preacher and the Slave, and I also adore.

Femslash February prompt list

Security Isn't Enough. Silicon Valley Needs 'Abusability' Testing sounds like a pipe dream in today's climate, but it would be wonderful if the omnipresent corporate giants that invade every aspect of our lives did decide to give a damn about what people do with their products.

How to Find Your Netflix Freeloaders—and Kick Them Out doesn't really apply to me, because I only share streaming accounts with Alex and my mother, but may be of interest to someone else. (Ninety devices registered to a hulu account?!)

Via umadoshi, Is Sunscreen the new Margarine?, which is very interesting to me as someone with a mother compulsively avoidant of the sun.

I spent loads of time outside in the sun as a kid, because I was on swim team, and I was lazier about sunscreen than my mother wanted me to be, though I only got a significant sunburn once, at the very beginning of one summer before I'd built up a tan. I turned into a hermit and moved to a much less sunny state (at a higher latitude), and my health has... pretty definitely been worse since. (And I got another, worse sunburn here, by being outside in a pool in the middle of the day with no tan for six hours and forgetting to reapply sunscreen and ended up blistering, I do not recommend the experience.)

And I have a diagnosed vitamin D deficiency. And I find myself writing wistful poetry about missing the way the sun feels in summer in the desert. I need to get outside more. Probably a vicious cycle--feel terrible, don't leave the house, feel worse, less inclined to leave the house.

Not that I can get much sun exposure right now, it's cold as fuck and mostly cloudy. (And right now it's the middle of the night--the ongoing disaster known as my "sleep schedule" certainly doesn't help either.)

Half of this post has been sitting in notepad since mid December, let's just get it out here.

Misc

Dinosaur comics has told me that ctrl shift esc opens task manager without having to click through the ctrl alt del menu??? I mean I have it pinned to my taskbar now so this is of limited utility to me these days but WHERE WAS THIS KNOWLEDGE TEN YEARS AGO?!

Comping White at the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses racism in the publishing industry, and what comp titles, a facet of publishing unknown to most laymen, can tell us about it. It's a pretty brutal picture.

Music

I'm listening mostly to the Bohemian Rhapsody soundtrack and miscellaneous other Queen (Who Wants to Live Forever is breaking my heart and something's bubbling under the surface in response), but also assorted S.J. Tucker, as I usually am--right now especially her Witchy Things 2018, which I also cannot link for you, as I bought it at Pagan Pride Day a few months ago, shortly before she had her baby, in a handwritten cardboard sleeve, and it's not online. Look to the Water is, as far as I can see, the only new track from it that she's uploaded to bandcamp thus far, and while it's great it's not my favorite on the album. (That honor goes to 11:57 ('Til It's Over), with Papa's Groove in second place.) It does also contain a few songs that are on other albums: Rootless, Little Bird, Sultry Summer Night, Witch's Rune. (Several of those are on Stolen Season, which is one of my absolute favorite of her albums.)

Since I wrote that paragraph, I've also discovered (via Rap Critic on youtube) Sammus, through her song Time Crisis, which has a great music video. I've been listening to Infusion, the album Time Crisis is on, way too much. Great stuff.

Fanfic

Fairy tale origfic, What the Frogs Knew. Frog Princess/Sleeping Beauty. Sweet and intricate and I really like the style.

#friendlyneighborhoodspiderpeople because I'm poking around fic after seeing Into the Spider-Verse and I always like fic with fake tweets or whatever, and this has tweets and reddit and discord and it's great! Citizens of New York: Why the fuck are there so many spiderpeople

Also a zillion Harry Potter fics, as usual.

Profic

I finally read Robin McKinley's Chalice! I haven't been up on her newer work in years--I still have Shadows and Pegasus yet to read, of the ebooks my library has--but I love her work and I've been meaning to get to it. It was such a Robin McKinley sort of ending, it was lovely. And there wasn't as much menace as I feared, because I know full well she can write a book I'll regret reading. (Looking at you, Deerskin.) But I loved it! It was great. And filled with bees. Robin McKinley's writing (when it's not wildly upsetting, Deerskin) makes me feel like I fit better in my skin.

Singing My Sister Down, recced by jamethiel, dark and sad.

Beyond Comprehension on Fireside Magazine was also sad and ended ambiguously, and is very much about the exploitation of black and brown communities and the ways we fail people with learning disabilities.

2086 at Strange Horizons is... also dark and sad and about the exploitation of communities of color, this seems to be a theme in what I've read lately.

The Date at Uncanny Magazine is a joyously monstrous bit of delight. With lesbians!