Birdfeeding

Jul. 30th, 2025 01:55 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly cloudy and sweltering.

I fed the birds.  I haven't seen much activity yet.
















.
 

Through A Rainbow, Darkly

Jul. 30th, 2025 02:29 pm
singmanyfaces: (ew)
[personal profile] singmanyfaces
I think it’s great that productions are trying to be more inclusive of less “mainstream” sexualities but, if they’re actually trying to provide better representation, they can still fumble the bag hard. The Corinthian from The Sandman is on my mind.

In the comic, he’s gay full-stop. In the first season of the Netflix series, he shows interest in men and women—not necessarily a bad thing, but when fans asked about it, official sources said that he should be considered pansexual for the show. For my mileage, it would’ve been better if that designation could have come up explicitly somehow; I’m a big believer in the stance that if it’s not in the text/on the screen it doesn’t really count as ‘canon,’ even if it’s an official writer or staffer saying it. But okay.

Then the second season comes around, and he doesn’t express interest in any men. Again, not necessarily a bad thing on it’s own. But then he’s also given a show-only romance plot with a female character (who is herself already a character that’s been swapped into the narrative in place of a male character) and frequently reminds people that he’s a new Corinthian, “different from the first one.” Even though that bit is true to the comic, it doesn’t mix well with the rest of the elements.

Like, this doesn’t feel like a queer diversity win. This feels like a production that wanted a gay character to kiss women instead, but didn’t want to lose it’s queer cred points.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Kris Ripper, Runaway Road Trip: A Definitely-Not-Romantic Adventure (2019) - a certain predictability that goes with the genre, really but kept up a reasonable momentum.

Annick Trent, By Marsh and by Moor (Marsh and Moor, #1) (2025): felt a bit so-so about this, not perhaps as taken by it as others of hers I've read.

Miranda July, All Fours (2024) - this was a Kobo deal so I gave it a try and eventually gave up. Is this maybe a generational thing? Hear it is quite A Thing, but really. (Was having pervasive flashes of my 'is it time to do some Doris Lessing re-reading?')

Also marked The Kellerby Code as DNF.

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was a Kobo deal and which I had not read for something like 50 years - had forgotten how talky it is. Some points for having Village Lesbian Couple, but these were fairly frequent in crime novels of the time, weren't they?

LM Chilton, Everyone in the Group Chat Dies (2025). I found this did the suspense thing pretty well once it got going but I had some cavils over the tone and the general idea of 'hilarious serial-killer thriller involving true crime social media mavens'. I am not sure this is quite the same thing as Universal Horror movies cycling round to 'Abbott and Costello meet [Monster]' as franchise grows tired.

On the go

Back to Lanny Budd - have now started Presidential Agent (1944).

Up next

That's likely to keep me going for a while, but I've got my eye on Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed, of which I have heard good report.

Peacock Pride [Arbitro/Akira; R]

Jul. 30th, 2025 08:21 pm
ldybastet: (Togainu - Kau)
[personal profile] ldybastet posting in [community profile] anime_manga
Title: Peacock Pride
Fandom/Pairing: Togainu no Chi - Arbitro/Akira
Summary: Akira has had the bad fortune of getting captured by Arbitro.
Rating: R
Content: Canon-compliant awfulness, loss of consciousness, kidnapping, non-con...
Disclaimer: Togainu no Chi and all the characters in it are owned by Nitro+CHiRAL. I'm only borrowing them. No disrespect intended and I'm not earning any money from writing this. No people, either real or fictional, were hurt in the writing of this story.
Notes: 400+ words. Written for the prompt them's the breaks, but this is what it turned into. Many thanks to [personal profile] zabimitsuki for beta-reading this for me, as well as cheering me on! :)

Read it here: DW | AO3
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an unsubtly sweet book, an homage to Puerto Rico and its people and also a lovely depiction of being a second-culture kid. Nico is a budding filmmaker, desperate to win the approval of the most famous Puerto Rican in the world, filmmaker and musical writer Juan Miguel Baranda. (I said "unsubtly," didn't I?) He's spending a glorious summer with his abuela and his two primos, looking forward to lazy days at abuela's house, glorious snacks, and beach time.

But the three cousins have far more adventure than they bargained for when they encounter a chupacabra--and the rest of the legends of Puerto Rico are not far behind. Nico and his family have to figure out what the mysterious creatures and sublime beings are trying to tell them, before the island they love faces devastation again--this time possibly for good.

Sometimes Nico's angst about his movie career and his parents' relationship slows the pace of this middle grade fantasy, but cousins Nessi and Kira are always there to pick up the pace--and Pineiro succeeds in what Nico hopes to do, painting a portrait of the island he loves so that the rest of the world can see what he loves about it.

The Story and the Engine

Jul. 30th, 2025 05:22 pm
purplecat: The Fifteenth Doctor (Who:Fifteen)
[personal profile] purplecat
The Story and the Engine exploits the introduction of the Pantheon to tell us a magic realist story. It is more restrained than the likes of The Giggle, The Devil's Chord and Lux and, I would say, the better for it. It exploits the magic to focus in on the people, their interactions and their history. It's an oddball episode that plays it straight.

I did have to watch it twice to figure out what was going on, and I'm not sure even now I quite understand why the Doctor was so angry with Omo, but it then it repays rewatching. It is also, of course, something contextually very different from anything Doctor Who has done before.

I'm very pleased that the casting of Ncuti Gatwa gave Doctor Who the push?/impetus?/excuse? to do a story like this, something that takes us to an Earth-based time and place beyond the somewhat UK/European focus of most of the series history. I'm also very pleased that so much effort went into treating the material respectfully - not least getting a well-respected Nigerian-born playwright to produce the script - though I somewhat suspect that getting a well-known playwright on board (at, I believe, Ncuti's suggestion) came first and the rest followed from that.

I think I need to watch it again at least once to decide what I really think about it, but I think that in a good way and I am looking forward to my next rewatch.

Dream Journal

Jul. 30th, 2025 01:07 pm
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
Had a dream last night that handful_ofdust and her family were living in a small republic in Eastern Europe that had beautiful art-deco architecture and a very confusing public transit system. I kept getting lost in train stations and there were at least three local languages.
mount_oregano: Let me see (judgemental)
[personal profile] mount_oregano

This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the Seattle Worldcon on Saturday evening, August 16.

Like other categories, novelettes have some overlap with this year’s Nebula Awards. Here are my ranked votes, and I based them on how original I thought the stories are. You may very reasonably have different criteria and choices. In fact, these two  reviewers made very different rankings.

6. “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 59) — Two sisters reconcile after a long estrangement, each with her own secrets. A slow, personal story that takes a surprising turn toward the end, but for me, the emotions are too muted.

5. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58) — Friends try to meet, but they can’t find each other even though they’re in the same place. Then things get more eerie (no spoilers). Not quite horror but very unsettling.

4. “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in Lake of Souls (Orbit) — A denizen of a distant planet suffers a crisis of identity and a planetary explorer struggles to survive. They meet, and this changes some things. Not a new idea, and in my opinion not developed in a new direction.

3. “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer (Asimov’s, September/October 2024) — Every now and then, Asimov’s publishes a story that isn’t exactly science fiction. A woman takes a hard look at her life and must set it right, but I saw the ending from a long way off.

2. “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons, Fund Drive 2024) — A wizard gets an apprentice, but there’s a problem — a monster-sized dragon problem. Well told with a little humor.

1. “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, May 2024) — The accidental discovery of a book printed on paper triggers an existential crisis in an electronic world with constant volatility. The understated storytelling style effectively delivers growing horror.


rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
I am trying to find a website that was some sort of general resource about bicycling to airports. I have some vague memory of encountering such a thing several years back.

I'd been using DuckDuckGo, but I think I'm DuckDuckDone with it. So far this morning I am amusing myself with Yahoo, although it looks about as enshittified as the Goog and Bing, which isn't much of a surprise.

Solar power news

Jul. 30th, 2025 10:51 am
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
Here is a story from KQED (pls support public radio) about Californians doing small-scale solar installations. While that by itself is interesting to learn about, I found it even more interesting to learn about the legislation passed recently in Utah to make it easier for people to put in these kinds of installations.

I also appreciated learning more about some of the logistical and legal complexities associated with this type of installation. When I learned about them becoming popular in Germany, the major issue raised in that article was concerns about fire safety, but clearly there's more to the story.
brightknightie: Midna, in imp form, and Link grin at each other (Zelda)
[personal profile] brightknightie
I have a small theory of the story to be revealed Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment that I haven't seen, which means the fandom at large considers it unlikely and unsupported.

Still, fwiw, as I think on the conjunction between the official statement that the story will be canon and a HW game's need for more playable characters than we currently have pinned down from Tears of the Kingdom -- Zelda, Raru, Mineru, the four masked sages; Sonia until she's murdered; maybe Ganondorf and Twinrova -- the more I suspect that the Ancient Hero (this guy) will be there. Like many, I suspect that he's part Zonai. A question is whether he's also part Hylian or part Gerudo or both (red hair always makes fans suspect Gerudo lineage, e.g. Malon, Groose) or whether he's part of that lost frog-like people seen only in statuary.

But as he is from 10,000 years before BotW/TotK canon, he can't be native to Raru's and Sonia's Founding Era, which is much further back. He can't be their son. (Separate theory: We could be getting their adult children in this game, as new characters.) He could be a descendant of theirs. He could be the Eighth Heroine of Gerudo legend (speculated by fans to have been male). And... he could have gotten to their era by the power of the Zelda of his own era, who could even have accompanied him, adding two to the playable line-up.

Or he could actually be their adult son, who gets catapulted to 10,000 years ago from the Founding Era by our Zelda in the course of the game.

Officially pronouncing this story to be canon, TPTB limited the possibilities for timey-wimey shenanigans messing with the story we know, but left them wide open for the stories we don't know.

Plane Viewing

Jul. 30th, 2025 10:27 am
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
I was originally scheduled to take a pretty terrible return redeye flight, departing from SFO at 11:40 pm Monday evening, arriving in Albany at 9 am Tuesday. But shortly before I was about to head over to the airport, I received a flurry of notifications from the airline to inform me that my flight would be egregiously delayed to the point where there would be absolutely no hope of making my connection in Detroit.

After fighting with the online rescheduling software, then fighting past their help chat chatbot, I eventually reached what seemed to be a human who helped me reschedule to an 11:30 am flight on Tuesday. That meant I had time to make pancakes on Tuesday morning, which also meant my sister and I had the amusement of her finding a container of huckleberries in her freezer that I had accidentally left there last fall.

Anyway.

The daytime flights turned out to be generally civilized. On the longer one to Detroit, I watched Madres Paralelas and found it to be one of the best Pedro Almodóvar films I've seen, for its political subtext (and gorgeous, fun sets). I'm predisposed to be fond of Almodóvar films because we watched so many of them in Spanish classes in high school for both the linguistic and cultural context.

Then I watched most of a documentary called Urbanized, about urban design and planning. Some aspects were really interesting, such as the commentary on what it is like to live in modern Beijing, and on how slums form and what can be done about that for the long term. Some parts were a little overhyped, but I could overlook those for the sake of the more interesting parts of the film. Okay, maybe "some" is an underestimate and more like half of it was overhyped. But oh well. That might be hard to avoid just because of the nature of the subject matter.

I did not attempt to watch anything on the shorter flight from Detroit to Albany. But I did appreciate that flying through Detroit was pretty direct, and that airport was amusing enough with its indoor people-mover.

I'm glad I wore the elastomeric respirator. It's not as comfortable as not wearing a mask, but it's much more comfortable than a disposable KN95 or than catching some nasty bug from flying. Hard to talk while wearing it, though. Maybe that's actually a benefit, too?

Now I need to go see what has happened with the saltwater tank while I was away. I got a call that two of the four horseshoe crabs had died, argh.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Death at the Manor (A Lily Adler Mystery) by Katharine Schellman, Clue in the Carriage House & Witness in the Wedding & Christmas in the Candlelight (The Inn at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley, and One Was a Soldier (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) by Julia Spencer-Fleming.


What I am Currently Reading: Heir, Apparently by Kara McDowell.


What I Plan to Read Next: I have more library books in my hot little hands, so probably the next Amelia Peabody.




Book 73 of 2025: Death at the Manor (A Lily Adler Mystery) (Katharine Schellman)

I enjoyed this book. spoilers )

This was a good book and I'm giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥



Book 74 of 2025: Clue in the Carriage House (The Inn at Holiday Bay) (Kathi Daley)

Good book! spoilers )

I enjoyed this story and am giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥



Book 75 of 2025: Witness in the Wedding (The Inn at Holiday Bay) (Kathi Daley)

Okay book, mostly because I got really annoyed by some of the ‘guests' early on and even when I found out what was going on I couldn't let that go. spoilers )

I mostly enjoyed this story; I'm giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥



Book 76 of 2025: One Was a Soldier (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (Julia Spencer-Fleming)

I was worried that I wouldn't like this book because it dealt with some difficult subject matter, but I ended up enjoying it a lot. spoilers )

This book ended up being really good! I'm giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥



Book 77 of 2025: Christmas in the Candlelight (The Inn at Holiday Bay) (Kathi Daley)

I enjoyed this book. spoilers )

Good book, despite my niggles. I'm giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥



DNF'd: The Case of the Haunted Hotel (Ghostly Glenwood Mysteries) by B I Skinner


I've broken 75 books already! I'm close to my goal of 100, so maybe I will surpass that. Or, perhaps when I get to the end of one or two of the series I'm currently reading, I'll return to fanfic so I can complete my comment bingo card. Or maybe I'll catch up on all the tv I've been leaving hanging. (Resident Alien, I'm looking at you.)

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