sebastienne

Still not king. Very far from being king, in fact.

I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.

But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.

All right, first, the boring life stuff.

( health, job, OMG MY FUCKING JOB )

Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.

I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.

Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.

Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.

My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.

On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.

TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.

After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.

Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.

Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.

Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.

This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.

cesy

I really appreciate when authors of longer fics occasionally put a note in the author's notes at the end of a chapter saying it's a good break point if you're binge-reading. Because yes, sometimes I do find it hard to stop, and it helps to have the author say that the next few chapters are intense and flow closely and you might prefer to pause before them rather than in the middle of them.

rmc28

... so I could watch Kpop Demon Hunters, after half my friends mentioned it, and my child told me it was good, and the songs kept turning up on my instagram feed, and I listened to the soundtrack yesterday.

Anyway, it was a great deal of fun, the music is so catchy, the film absolutely leans into its premise, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I'm not great at watching TV at all, and especially not by myself, but I'm glad I did. (I might put it on again, maybe the singalong version, at some point.)

I watched approx 2/3 of it between skating lesson and uni hockey practice and the other 1/3 after getting home. I'd just turned it off to get changed, when in walked the students with the speaker playing the soundtrack (and one of the songs, Golden, lived on repeat in my head throughout practice).

kaberett

Between one thing and another we wound up having a semi-impromptu mini-break in Chester, including a few hours at Chester Zoo.

... where we went into the bats enclosure and were transfixed for about an hour, basically from the moment we walked in until chucking-out time.

It's a big dark room, artificially crepuscular, with lots of trees (dead) for roosts, and somewhere in the vicinity of 350 bats (Seba's short-tailed and Rodrigues fruit bats). THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. They were flying well within a foot of our faces. You could FEEL THE WIND FROM THEIR WINGBEATS.

And A was greatly honoured by one LANDING ON THEIR TROUSERS.

There were many other Excellent Creatures -- the Humboldt penguins in particular were very excited by the rain (so much porpoising), and the giant otters were indeed giant, and there was an enormous dragonfly, and the flamingos went from almost entirely asleep (including one baby that had not yet got the hang of the whole one-leg trick) to YELLING INCESSANTLY after being buzzed by the scarlet ibis.

Extremely good afternoon out, 13/10, would recommend.

thefairymelusine

I watched the A Late Delivery From Avalon episode of Babylon 5 the other night, and I thought of you

quirkytizzy because I remembered you quoting Marcus's speech about taking comfort in the unfairness of the universe years ago. (I prob last saw the episode as an actual child because my parents were very into Babylon 5 and it tended to be on British telly at the same time that I was eating supper, thus I watched a lot of Babylon 5 when very small. Am realising on this rewatch that the reason I found it terrifying as a small child was because it is, in fact, quite a genuinely scary show. It is not safe in the way Star Trek or Farscape is. But this is also why it is really brilliant.

Anyway, don't know if you'll see this Tizzy and I know you don't blog much these days, but it made me think of you.

(Also, what an episode! Really incredibly moving and just very kind about trauma. Also, the bits of the Arthurian legend that "Arthur" had imprinted on in it were some specific passages in Thomas Malory that I wrote about during my Masters coursework. So that made me very happy.)

kaberett

Reading. Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie: finished the Radch stories; on to The World Of The Raven Tower!

The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman: in progress; not yet Cross with it but also not yet Impressed by it.

More Dreamwidth catchup.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac!

Eating. SO many tomatoes.

Exploring. Poked around Preston a very little!

Growing. ... SO many tomatoes. More watering system established at plot (so hopefully all the peppers will still be alive and well upon my return). Sowed some probably-past-it seeds.

Observing. A saw a deer on the drive up to Preston! A proper big one with antlers and all! We were very impressed.

Also the local owl Yell.

naraht

I had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.

When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"

"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.

No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)

Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?

kaberett

Or at least "the other line I meant to highlight from the Wikipedia article":

There is increasing evidence that the smooth muscle that lines the airways becomes progressively more sensitive to changes that occur as a result of injury to the airways from dehydration.

I had only taken 700ml of water with me; I'd blithely assumed I'd be able to top up at the café and then had Too Much Social Anxiety to ask or even check whether they had a jug out, because that's a thing my brain is definitely Doing at the moment. ... and then on the way back I was desperately thirsty and stole most of A's water, and I am just personally finding it Very Interesting that the thing my body wanted me to do most was More Fluids.

rydra_wong

Please enjoy this eloquent depiction of The Capra Demon Experience:

Watch on YouTube

(Content note for animal harm in the form of killing horrifying skinless zombie dogs. Also one man's slow descent into existential despair.)

This is a notorious point where a not insignificant number of people ragequit and stop playing the game altogether.

Also as previously mentioned I struggle badly with tracking multiple inputs, I have the reaction speed of a slime mould, and my default combat state is "panicked and flustered."

It took me about 7 hours (spread across multiple days -- admittedly, most of this time was doing the boss run again and again and again and then dying within seconds of the fight starting) and I am very proud of myself.

(And right now I am dealing with a medical stressor -- hopefully nothing, but had to go get some tests, waiting on results -- so I will take my distractions and wins where I can get them.)

kaberett

Have a Wikipedia link.

( Read more... )

vass

Books
Finished the Danny Lavery book, except for the missing pages. (I told the librarian, and she ordered a new copy and put a reserve on it for me.)

Started Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy's The Bottoming Book. (I bought The Topping Book too, and decided to, well, start from the bottom.)

Fandom
The Lays server (Nine Worlds fandom) held a bingo-themed prompt fest for the month of August: there was a grid of prompts (anonymously submitted to a google form, then posted on AO3 by the exchange mods), a 500 word minimum, and a collective goal (which we met) of blacking out the whole board. I wrote part 1 of Peer Review, and hope to write and post the concluding part soon. I hope the anonymous person who posted that prompt isn't too upset with me. (~~It was me.~~)

Music
Went through a few days of listening to Vienna Teng's 'We've Got You' a perhaps concerning number of times.

Games
Spire-slaying continues: have now unlocked (but not beaten yet) Ascension level 9 for all four characters.

Crafts
Secret!cross-stitch still in the design phase, but I've made progress.

Did a weekend DIY project of painting my clothesline and restringing it.

Garden
It's September, which means that the grass/weeds have exploded almost overnight, and it's raining often enough that mowing is tricky to manage.

I planted some lavender and rosemary near the clothesline, and they are still alive so far and even (the lavender) flowering.

Hope you're all doing okay.

kaberett

Have achieved More Event Prep: both the arrows catalogue updating (albeit not printing), and Folding All The Potions ~~that printed successfully~~.
Friend is watching Orphan Black for the first time. I am getting Yelling. It's DELIGHTFUL.
Yesterday, leaving the lower limbs class that has been prescribed in an attempt to reduce the risk of reinjuring my ankle again, I... turned my ankle. (This is not the good bit.) In more or less the same way I did in April, that was the motivation for the current round of physio, but whether it was the exercises having actually helped anything at all or the fact that I was wearing different (and more supportive) boots or just pure luck, while it's a bit sore it is not e.g. refusing to bear weight any time I don't pay adequately close attention to how I load it, so I'm counting that one as a win.
We forgot New Elephant Day on Monday (Sheldrick Wildlife Trust calendar) so instead had New Elephant Day today... AND IT AN ADORABLE BABY RHINO. 13/10, etc.
I am nearly at the point where I think I might be able to read the Wikipedia page on action potentials and derive meaning from it? I'm definitely slightly less confused about the cell biologist's definition of depolarization than I was even yesterday...

rmc28

Books on pre-order:

Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)

Books acquired in August:

and read:
1. The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Penric & Desdemona) by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. The Work of Art (Somerset Stories 1) by Mimi Matthews
3. The Arctic Curry Club by Dani Redd [3]

Books acquired previously and read in August:

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan [3][May]

Borrowed books read in August:

A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher
Iron Flame (Empyrean 2) by Rebecca Yarros [2]

[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited

azurelunatic

It turns out that there is a timeout to the "let's test your equipment" for the browser-based telehealth appointments with my therapist. That timeout is 5 minutes. I had to switch to my phone, which is always vexatious for me.

Recently, Belovedest hauled Dad's old machine (dubbed Galumph, after the imaginary draft horse stallion Dad always talked about as his preferred riding beast) out to test it and see if it would run. (The massive monitor that came with it did not run, but I have found a suitably crusty-looking TV and other screen based appliance repair shop to attempt a repair.) Galumph ran. Belovedest looked at the specs. "That's a freaking RACK SERVER masquerading as a desktop!!!" they said, or words to that general effect.

So after we returned from the Michigan trip, I told Belovedest that it was time to take them up on their offer to rebox my poor old suffering machine.

I accidentally gave them the wrong figures for my C: and D: drives, so there was a bit of a flurry at first, but after they switched them, they were able to get to a login screen. I opened my Chrome / User Data / Default / Sessions folder, copied the most recent Tabs_* and Session_* files to a subfolder that I've named "Explicit Distrust" and launched my browser.

All 1,5XX tabs opened.

I've been trying to decrease them a little bit ever since, starting with my Main window, where the tabs tend to proliferate with abandon. (Trying to do this on the old hardware took forever, in addition to me getting distracted by shiny things.)

azurelunatic

United Healthcare sent me a letter, dated August 26, to tell me that they were taking away my primary care of record (not actually my real primary care) -- retroactively not covered since May 16. And assigning me to someone whose UHC profile shows that he only takes 0-17 year old patients.

"If you have any questions" I could call in. Where I learned that there were a lot of those letters sent out in error.

I requested that the UHC phone agent quote me with any creative profanity she'd like to attribute to me when conveying my displeasure to her supervisors.

I called the schedulers listed for my "new primary care", who instructed me to call UHC back to say that I wanted to keep my actual primary care doctor (who I've had since my former nurse-practitioner went into Infectious Diseases. And gave me the "MPI" number of my current doctor, and further instructions on how to make this happen. (But it can't continue happening until tomorrow, because both of them close down their phones at 5.)

Kudos to that agent, who was on the phone with me past her scheduled departure time. I thanked her for that.

kaberett

multiple colours of sliced tomatoes, prominently featuring some blue-black with red stars

(By "today's" I mean not "all of those harvested today, nor even yesterday" but rather "the tomato course with dinner".)

I really love the ridiculous stars on the tops of the Blue Fire.

fox

Almost every joint in my body cracks. I don't normally feel aches or tension in my hips or elbows (or lower back, thank god) before they make The Noise, but I do everywhere else - ankles, especially the right; knees, especially the right; shoulders, usually the right (but lately the left is bothering me more); spine, which I know is not a joint; neck; both wrists; all fingers.

Each finger (but not the thumbs) cracks at two knuckles, and there's something so very strangely satisfying about getting all eight in a row without having to Do Anything Special to my left little finger (first knuckle) or either index finger (second knuckle).

Last spring I'm pretty sure I strained or even sprained my jaw singing Mozart. That was a bummer. It did an unexpected pop two or three days in a row and then it hurt for weeks - I had to be careful how I opened my mouth when I yawned, which is surprisingly difficult. And just for the past couple of days my left shoulder, as I said, has been bothering me. I thought it might be referred pain from switching to a new bite guard on my bottom teeth, one that I haven't worn a hole in, but it doesn't seem to be that; my next theory is Hormones. (Perimenopause can suck a flagpole.)

Current Mood: okay

skibbley

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skibbley

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azurelunatic

I picked a hotel based on price and reviews, and I think I picked poorly. Housekeeping was by request only, but they communicated that exactly bloody nowhere. The staff were universally friendly and courteous, but the lack of communication about that vital issue was overwhelming. I had to request housekeeping on Sunday twice, and the second time the person who arrived with fresh towels and to take away the garbage said something peculiar, about having us on the housekeeping list the next morning. I inquired, and learned that it is a lingering Covid safety policy. I would rather have universal masking as the lingering Covid safety policy.

Spicy mango frozen margaritas are delicious. We went to a local brewery, I think on Friday after the parish hall setup for the party. S & Z went for the frozen margarita "flight" and we passed the little goblets around for tasting. I tried the raspberry daiquiri (non frozen) and found it too sour. But I was able to enjoy the hot rim on the mango margarita, to the extent that I looked up recipes and got a bottle of Tajín after we got home. We played Sushi Go (except for Mums) and Wizard (except for me). There was no duckie in the big fishbowl drink as they were out. Alas. Hot Rim is our new band, and all the titles of the songs are double entendres, each followed by a B-side entitled "... Vociferously!"

Pips' partner H came for Saturday and Sunday, and it was very good to meet them. Belovedest has a sticker on their water bottle reading "I'm the enby sheep", and H is another such enby sheep. And Goth. We took to each other immediately.

The anniversary party was a hit. I even convinced Belovedest to dance with me to "I Will Survive", which I named as "our song" — not incorrect, but it's my song from nerd camp, and I believe their song by way of yeeting the evil ex, rather than our song together.
Cleanup on site was very swift, and we didn't actually have to stack all the chairs. Afterwards at home (the parental home), V and Mums put away leftovers and sorted the salad (cucumber and tomato separate from the lettuce) while the rest of the kid generation gossiped and played games and I carefully pulled the photos off the science fair board and sorted them back into their ziplock bags.

There was Sunday brunch, and I think we may not go there again — both of us and perhaps more of the party had mild food poisoning symptoms that afternoon. It didn't ruin our days fully, but I was glad to have my fully stocked medical kit on hand.

Squaredle is one of the family preoccupations. It's a NYT game that resembles Boggle, except it's a composed game rather than random, and the boards vary in size and shape. (One recent one was a 5x5 doughnut, with the middlemost letter missing.) There were also games of Boggle.

I did have the new folding power chair for the trip, which saved my strength for the important things. The acquisition is its own story, with the Bastard & Our Lady's own lucks. (This is a distinct entity from the folding scooter, which should arrive later this month.)

Crochet updates:
My #10 crochet cotton super Goth beaded choker is finished with the structural crochet work and needs the final outside beading. I'm waiting on more of the beads.
The self-striping granny triangle shawl has the first triangle complete, and I could wear it like that if I wanted to. Now that I know how it's sized, I've started the second triangle of three to make it a trapezoid.
Secret #10 crochet cotton project with a due date: I need to make a crucial measurement, but I found the perfect button in my collection. Awaiting the first chain. And I am pleased beyond measure to have been commissioned it.

Yellface is extremely glad we're home. She lectured us at length about having left, in tones I've never heard from her before. That was the extent of her displeasure, fortunately.

I experimented, and got us a first class upgrade on our way out. There was almost enough foot room for Belovedest, and enough elbow room for me. I even napped some. There was a cheese plate, and I felt secure enough in my prophylactic meds to partake. The only problem was the combination of my swoopy sleeves with armrest cup holders, so my right sleeve became saturated with ginger ale for a while.
Coming back was very crammed, even though we were in the premium seats with some extra foot room.

I'm glad I went.

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sebastienne

June 2024

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Page generated Sep. 11th, 2025 06:14 am

Reading

quarterly report?

I <3 fandom

I reactivated Netflix tonight

BATS

(no subject)

vital functions

That sort of person

[embodiment] that was the other thing I meant to say about EIB

Yesterday I beat the Capra demon

[embodiment] some notes on exercise-induced bronchospasm

Things

all things very

To-read pile, 2025, August

Galumph!

United Healthcare is at it again

today's tomatoes (before the spring onion and balsamic vinegar)

out of joint(s)

BCN - AI

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Returned from Mitchagain

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June 2024

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