nsmorig | Reading

Work today included four hours of meetings, sprinkled throughout the day. Which makes it so much harder to get work done, because just as you get started on something, you have to stop for another bloody meeting. My strategy for days like this is to try to multitask during the meetings, listening with one ear while I catch up on Slack and my email, so that when I get that half hour block of time, I can try (I don’t always succeed) to get some actual work done. But it's hard to do focused, concentrated work in short bursts like that, so I never feel like I get anything done.

Things I DID manage to accomplish today (mostly before work, during lunch, and after work):

Walked 30 minutes (in three 10 minute “exercise snacks”). My body is still cranky about me starting to work out again, but it needs to be done.

I almost got caught up on washing the dirty dishes. Just a few more glasses and items in the sink and I can declare All Dishes Are Washed (and that will last about 30 seconds…. Because then I’m going to want a snack, LOL)

Assembled the vacuum (HUZZAH). Honestly, the hardest part was opening the box, which they had taped ALL around Every. Single. Edge of the box. Which made it almost impossible to figure out which flap was supposed to open to get into the darned thing. But it was a single screw assembly, just to attach the handle to the body, and then I was ready to rock. Vrrroooooom!

I vacuumed the living room, hallway, and bedroom carpets. At least everywhere that the vacuum could easily reach without me moving things. This weekend I’m going to have to shift all the side tables, chairs, and bedside stands, and probably pull out the attachments to get to the dust bunnies that I can see hiding from me. And I need to “spider vacuum” with the long attachment, because there are too many cobwebs in this place. I swear the spiders take advantage of how dark it is during the winters around here, and then the summer sun comes in and all I can see are cobwebs.

Hauling the vacuum boxes and the dead vacuum out to the dumpster is going to have to wait for the morning as we got well into the high 90s today and it’s still too goddam hot to go outside. If I can get out early tomorrow before work, at least it will “only” be in the high 70s. *sighs in heat wave*

sartorias

"Old-timey" seems to be an emerging term for stuff either set or written before the 21st Century. Here we get an amusing confusion: Old-Timey regency romances, I noted when scanning reviews by what appears to be younger-than-me readers, refers to the regency romances written in the sixties-eighties, even the nineties.

I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.

I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.

But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.

I finished last night.

Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.

But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)

But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.

Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?

That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.

I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.

That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.

The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.

In the donation box the old ones go.

*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.

Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...

seekingferret

I've done this exercise some past years (2020 2019, I've also written up a few Philcons, I think...), mostly to show how inadequate and silly the treatment of fanfic has been at past Worldcons. But here's the list of all of the fanfic panels at the Seattle Worldcon, and it's frankly incredible. It's such a diverse group of panel topics, covering history, technique, craft, culture, community. I'm excited to be on a couple of these panels myself, and to attend some of the others. The team who came up with them and got them onto the schedule deserves all the kudos.

Full Program for Seattle Worldcon

Fix-It Fic
The “fix-it fic” is a staple of the fanfic community, but why do we write it? What do we get out of it? What tropes are fix-it fic writers drawn to, and how can it be done well? What happens when the fanfic is better than the show, and how do small tweaks in canon lore to “fix” canon mistakes change everything?

Star Trek and Fanfic
The earliest modern fanfic arose in the mid-1960s, while the original Star Trek was still on the air. It’s often called the ur-fandom in fanfic communities, even though the roots of fanfic can be traced to Homer or earlier. What made Trek fanfic different from the earlier stories-about-stories, and what’s made it so enduring?

Filk and Fanfic: Two Great Tastes
Filk and fanfic cover some of the same ground: character studies, missing scenes, genre twists (from dramatic to funny or vice-versa), new stories in an existing universe, adding a sexy twist, or shifting the POV character. Sometimes, they don’t use a single character or event from the original, but everyone recognizes it as specific commentary. Come explore what else these two often-neglected types of fan works have in common.

Is That Fanfic?
Some books that might be “fanfic” aren’t called fanfic: Unauthorized spinoffs (Wicked, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Wind Done Gone), sequels by different authors (most comic books), and authorized books based on TV series. It’s not limited to text: Gaming mods for video games, role-playing games in licensed settings (Middle Earth, Call of Cthulhu), and fan-made games like Jumpchain also put a new spin on existing content. Are they types of fanfic? What else would we call “I made a story about someone else’s story?”

Building Writing Skills Through Fan Fiction
Before we write, we read, and often, it’s our favorite stories and characters that inspire us to be writers in the first place. Whether you stick with fan fiction or not, fan fiction is a place where young writers can play in a familiar sandbox, honing their skills and building their own authorial voice. Which fanfic writing skills translate directly to pro-writer skills—and what fanfic skills don’t connect to commercial markets at all?

ao3 mcu a:aou a.b.o. bdsm ot3 hs au pwp
Do you know what the title of this panel means? Come learn about the specialized vocabulary of fanfic: how and why the abbreviations and other terms get invented, and how that language works to build and sustain fanfic communities. (The kink tomato is not a food; dead dove is not a bird. Does “HS” stand for high school or Homestuck?)

Filing Off the Serial Numbers
Plenty of fanfic authors have “filed off the serial numbers” and republished their fic as mainstream stories. The most famous is Fifty Shades of Grey, but the Vorkosigan Saga began as Star Trek fanfic. What works, and what doesn’t? Is this a reasonable career-starter for new would-be pro writers? Are there any tips to make it work better or any traps to avoid?

What Is the OTW/AO3?
In 2007, Astolat blogged that fanfic writers need an archive of their own, not beholden to corporate interests and censorship. Eighteen years after the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) started it, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) is going strong, with a Hugo Award in 2019, and now over 4 million users and 14 million works. Come find out how it happened, how it works, how you can find what you want to read—and, if you’re interested, how to get involved.

Fanfic as Therapy
Fanfic isn’t just writing practice or sharing ideas about what happens next when the series is over—it’s also used to explore personal emotions and reactions to trauma. Come discuss the therapeutic value of fanfic as both writers and readers in a moderated open discussion rather than a traditional panel.

What *Is* Fanfiction, Anyway?
What is fanfic, and why is it important to science fiction fandom? Panelists will discuss the history of fanfiction and its connections to SFF fandom, what makes it different from authorized spinoffs, and how the fanfic community perceives itself.

Licenced TTRPGs as Fanfic
TTRPGs have a long history of media-licensed game systems: Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Universe, Middle Earth Role-Playing, and dozens of lesser-known games for TV shows or movies. Panelists will explore the connections and differences between “Let’s play a game in this setting” and “I want to write a story in this setting.”

Fanfic Community as Gift Economy
The pros and cons of an artistic community with a strong non-economic, even anti-commercial, bias. How fanfic works outside of writing markets, and what happens when fanfic writers go pro. This will be a moderated group discussion, rather than a regular panel—everyone can participate.

Not Just Training Wheels
Fanfic is often claimed to be “good practice” on one’s route to becoming a professional author, but this is not the only reason people write fanfic. Panelists will discuss some of the others: bonding with a community, exploring story concepts with very niche appeal, enjoying a personal fantasy, and more.

Fanfic on Paper
From mimeograph with staples or comb-binding to small runs of offset printing and artisanal fanbindings with custom covers, fanfic has never been published like other literature. Find out how it used to be done, how it shifted to digital publishing, and how it’s shared on paper now. We’ll look at the history of fanzines and the current fanbinding hobby, the ethics of publishing in a niche community, and the controversies of commercialization.

Making It Gay… or Trans, Neurodivergent, BIPOC, and More
In a media world that too often does not represent women, queerness, BIPOC identities, neurodivergence, or people with disabilities, it’s no wonder we choose to represent ourselves and/or our desires in the fanfic we write. This panel isn’t about why we take cishet characters and make them gay, trans, or a dozen other things; it’s about why we should and the freedom and joy that goes with knowing we can.

The Absent S: (Fem)Slash and Sapphics
When most people hear slash, they think man-and-man (M/M), but in modern parlance the term actually applies to any “ship” that is same-sex. In some fandoms, femslash is the main “ship”! Let’s talk about the differences between F/F and M/M fanfic and fandoms, how femslash is often overlooked or looked down upon in fandom (even when it’s the main “ship” of certain fandoms!), and what femslash means to sapphics in fandom.

Dipping One Toe In: First-Time Fanfic
Have you never read fanfic or are a little interested but are not sure where to start? Come to this panel, where our set of talented and friendly experts will try to give you recommendations—suggestions on which fandoms, authors, and fics might be right up your alley.

Reclamation Through Fanfiction
Fanfiction often ignores the canon setting and relationships to tell stories the original creators never intended. But can it ignore the setting’s creator? From Lovecraft to Rowling to Gaiman, many authors of beloved works are later discovered to be prejudiced or predatory or both. Can fanfiction be used to take back some of these works and put distance between the author and the art?

Smut for Fun, Not Profit
Fanfic erotica is so famous that many believe it’s all of fanfic. Learn how the tropes and styles of kinky and erotic topics change when they are written by and for a shared community. Let’s discuss how kinky writing changes when there’s no potential of commercial activity and it’s all about what gets you hot and what gets your readers hot.

brickhousewench

Did I assemble my new vacuum and enjoy clean carpets last week?

Of course I did not. Work was too busy, so it didn't get done in the evenings. And then I spent my weekend napping and lost between the pages of a book, in 1919 England. Avoiding my housework as hard as I could.

But, as it turns out, I could not avoid my housework forever, as I was supposed to have a technician in the house today. And of course the place is a complete disaster, because I decided to do one of those Purge 30 Bags in 30 Days decluttering challenges this month. So I had pulled a whole bunch of stuff out and spread it all over the living room.

So the past two days have been frantically washing dishes, doing laundry, hauling stuff out to the dumpster, and then throwing random books into the boxes that I just emptied. And the kicker? It was all for naught. I got a call this afternoon. Apparently my technician fell down and might have broken his ankle. Their boss was calling to let me know that he wouldn’t be out (because he was heading to the hospital) and they’d have to reschedule.

But at least the house is SO MUCH cleaner.

And reader, the vacuum still is not assembled. By the time I got done with work today, I just didn’t have the energy. It will get done. Just not today.

starspray

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Maglor, Elrond, Maedhros, various others
Warnings: References to torture and trauma
Summary: Maglor keeps a promise, and comes to Valinor, only to find the ghosts he thought he'd left behind are alive and waiting for him.
Note: This fic is a sequel to Clear Pebbles of the Rain, which is itself a sequel to Unhappy Into Woe.

Prologue / Previous Chapter

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: You're the One for Me - Delta Rae

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: accomplished

cimorene

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from

waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what

thefourthvine and

norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: tired

starspray

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: I'm Still Here - Treasure Planet

settiai

I'm trying to get a bunch of things done before D&D tonight, including cleaning up the hotel suite. I still need to wash clothes this weekend, but I'm holding off on that until Sunday so that I can fit as many as possible into a single load since it's $8 to wash/dry each one.

My hope, however, is to get everything but that done today so that I can properly settle in and play video games all day long tomorrow. I keep saying that's the plan for the weekend, and then something comes up to prevent it, so I'm really going to try my best this time because I know it will help on the mental health front to lose myself in another world for an entire day.

I'm leaning towards Baldur's Gate 3, but I might go with Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead. Or even Mass Effect. I definitely think it's going to be something I've already played before, though, because something new-to-me requires a different headspace that I don't think I'm in at the moment.

We'll see how it goes, I suppose? 🤞🏻

Current Mood: hopeful

starspray

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Learn Me Right - Birdie, Mumford & Sons

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: tired

brickhousewench

Probably none of this will make any sense to people, but I'm super proud of myself, so I'm gonna write about it. This is kinda a follow up post to the one I made about a week ago, so maybe go read that one for background?

Our new Helm Maintainers group has been really cranking. To date we have:
* Closed 47 pull requests as already fixed, duplicates, or no longer needed.
* Actually reviewed, updated, and merged 11 pull requests.

Our automation is supposed to release the updated Helm charts once a week, but since the developers weren’t getting around to doing code reviews, we weren’t having any updates, so the guy who set up our automation turned off the weekly releases. Which I kinda suspected after I looked at all the workflows and saw that they hadn’t been triggered in two months. So when out weekly team meeting ended early on Tuesday, I messaged him right after the call ended and asked, since we had twenty minutes free, if he could talk me through the workflows. Because there were five different workflows with “helm” in the name, and I wanted to understand which ones did what.

He talked me through all of them. And I took notes. And after I got off the call with him, I wrote up my notes in a Google Doc and shared it with the two Developer Advocates that I’m working with. Because I’m a technical writer, it’s what I do. And also, we shouldn’t be in a situation where only one guy knows how all this works. Then I was going to knock off for the day. But I’m promised myself (and posted on the Community Slack) that I’d make sure we got a release out on Tuesday. So I pushed the button. And instead of generating a new PR, it updated an existing PR that I didn’t realize was still hanging around (I’d closed a bunch of that were at least two months old). I pinged the developer and he said that was expected behavior. Then I was going to wait until this morning to merge the PR. But I wanted to push the button.

So Reader, I pushed the button.

I could see immediately that the Helm Chart version was updated in our repository. But one of the workflows was to publish the chart to another repo and to the ArtifactHub, which is where people download them from. And I didn’t see it published, even after I cleared my browser cache. I had dinner, checked back, still didn’t see it. Then, when I was really ready to finally shut down for the night and stop watching, the chart in ArtifactHub finally updated.

So I did a thing. Because we hadn’t run the workflows in two months, I wasn’t sure if they were going to work or not (we had a security incident back at the end of April and had to replace all our authorization tokens and I keep finding workflows that we missed, because we haven’t used them since then). But everything worked, just the way it was supposed to. And I published a new set of Helm Charts. Whoo hoo!

brickhousewench

https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomer-hoa-homeowners-association-fees-downsizing-retirement-home-sales-2025-3

Older homeowners tell Business Insider that steep HOA fees are making it harder to downsize.

The average HOA fee has soared 42% since 2019, worsening housing affordability.

And a growing number of US homes are governed by HOAs.

Like many older homeowners, [Patrick Luzzi would] like to downsize to a single-story home that he can comfortably age in. But after nearly two years of searching for a suitable condo in his home county of Westchester, he's not sure he can afford to.

Luzzi looked into a condo complex in the town of Somers, New York, about 40 minutes north of him, but was discouraged to find that the HOA fees run between $1,600 and $2,000 a month, he said.

According to the US Census Bureau, the average HOA fee in the US was $243 a month in 2023. That's 42% higher than the average HOA fee in 2019, which was $170.

$2000 a month? WTF? My condo fees currently stand at $521 a month, but that’s not just paying for the dumpster, landscaping, and snow removal. We also have a pool (that I have never used). And our gas heat (and cooking) is included in the monthly fee. I’d think it was outrageous if our heat wasn’t included.

sartorias

Actually I've been doing a ton of reading while I shake off the last of this influenza, which is mostly now lingering chest crud and zero stamina.

While nothing has blown me away, and I've abandoned some other "not for me" books, I did make a virtuous start on The Cull. Beginning with C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

My copy, the 1965 paperback edition printed in the US, has a cover that actually sort of fits the book, unlike a lot of SF covers of the time depicting generic space skies and cigar rocket ships, with or without a scantily clad lady joined by guys in glass helmets and bulky space suits.

No woman on the cover here, which would have been false advertising as the only woman on stage during the entire novel is a distraught country housewife in the first few pages. (And no, I do not think that this is a sign that Lewis despised women, so much as that he had spent all his childhood and early manhood among males, so his default characters are going to be "he" among "hims". But that's a discussion for another book.)

I've had Lewis's space trilogy since high school (1968). This one I read I think twice, once that year, and then again when the Mythopoeic Society had branches and our West LA discussion group covered the three books.

Teen-me trudged through the first reading looking for story elements that would interest me, and though a line here and there was promising, I found it overall tedious, missing the humor entirely. On that second reading during my college years I saw the humor, and found more to appreciate in Lewis's thematic argument, but that was a lukewarm enough response that I never reread it during the ensuing fifty years.

Now in old age it's time to cull a massive print library that neither of my kids wants to inherit. What to keep and what to donate? I reread this book finally, and found myself largely charmed. The structure is strongly reminiscent of the fin de siecle SF of Wells, Verne, etc--inheritors of the immensely popular "travelogue" of the 1600-1700s--which means it moves rather slowly, full of the description of discovery (and anticipatory terror) as its protagonist, a scholar named Ransom, stumbles into a situation that gets him kidnapped by a figure from his boarding school days, Weston, and Weston's companion, a man named Devine.

As was common in the all-male world of British men of Lewis's social strata, the men all go by last names--I don't think Weston or Devine are ever given a first name, and there are at most two mentions of Ransom's first name, Elwin, which I suspect was only added as a nod to JRRT. Apparently this book owes its origin to a bet made between Lewis and Tolkien, which I think worth mentioning because of the (I think totally wrong) assumptions that Lewis was anti-science. The bet, and the dedication to Lewis's brother, make it plain that they read and enjoyed science fiction--had as boys.

I suppose it's possible to eagerly read SF and still be anti-science, but I don't think that's the case here; accusations that Lewis hates scientific progress seem to go hand-in-hand with scorn for Lewis's Christianity. But I see the scientific knowledge of mid-thirties all over this book. In fact, I don't recollect reading in other contemporary SF (admittedly I haven't read a lot of it) the idea that once you're out of Earth's gravity well, notions of up and down become entirely arbitrary. Though Lewis seems not to understand freefall, he does represent the changes in gravity and in light and heat--it seems to me that the science, though full of errors that are now common knowledge, was as up-to-date as he could make it. That also shows in the meticulous worldbuilding--and to some extent in the fun he had building his Martian language.

What he argues against when the three men are at last brought before the god-like Oyarsa, is a certain attitude toward Progress as understood then, and also up through my entire childhood: that it didn't matter what you did to other beings or to the environment, as long as it was in the name of Progress or Humanity. We get little throwaways right from the start that Lewis's stance clear, such as when Devine and Weston squabble about having a guard dog to protect their secret space ship, but Devine points out that Weston had had one but experimented on it.

Lewis hated vivisection. He knew it was torture for the poor helpless beasts in the hands of the vivisectionists, who believed animals had no feelings, etc etc. He also hated the byproducts of mass industrialization, as he makes plain in vivid images. Lewis also makes reference to splitting the atom and its possible results; I think it worthwhile to note that during the thirties no one knew what the result would be--but there was a lot of rhetoric hammering that we need bigger and better bombs, and splitting the atom would give us that. All in the name of Humanity. Individual lives have no meaning, and can be sacrificed with impunity as long as it's in the name of "saving Humanity."

As his theme develops, it's made very clear that moral dilemmas trouble Ransom--he's aware that humans contain the capability for brilliant innovation and for vast cruelty. He also holds up for scruntiny the idea that the (white) man is the pinnacle of intelligence in the cosmos. The scene when Weston talks excruciating pidgin in his determination to subordinate the Martians and their culture to the level of "tribal witch doctors" is equally hilarious and cringey.

In short, it took over fifty years for me to appreciate this book within the context of its time. I don't feel any impulse to eagerly reread it, but I might some day. At any rate, it stays on the shelf.

brickhousewench

My new vacuum just arrived! A day early!

I know what I'm doing after work.

ETA - And I worked late and ran out of steam. It might have to wait until the weekend. =(

seekingferret

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This was slight in the way Scalzi's books often are- he has good storytelling instincts but a reluctance to deeply interrogate his premises.

This has a similar premise to Hench, which I panned as 'morally bewildering.' The moral stakes are much clearer here, which made it easier to enjoy. Our hero inherits the family business, which his late uncle explicitly identifies as supervillainy, but the book doesn't expect you to sympathize with the ideology of supervillainy, merely the poor sadsack protagonist who must navigate this murky world and try to figure out where his own lines are drawn and how to make it out alive.

Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

Continuing on the theme. This was pitched as The Office in a supervillain's fortress, and it mostly fits the brief, albeit laden down with a slow burn romance between the villain and his personal assistant that I could have done without.

Here there is no question that we are supposed to understand the villain as a Robin Hood standing up to an oppressive king, but that supposed to is doing a lot of work. Maehrer seems caught between prongs of her scenario- for Evie's defection to the villain to be a source of angst and happening at risk of communal alienation, the king needs to be popular in her village. For her to have the moral clarity and belief in her mission required to be an effective assistant to the villain, the king needs to be transparently a tyrant. Splitting the middle here doesn't quite land. I kept waiting for the substantive reasons for Evie's rejection of the king's law to become clearer, but probably we are just supposed to read it as the evolving consequences of her growing love for the villain rather than any sort of political awakening.

That said, the handling of the evil office politics is a delight and I particularly enjoyed a baffling set of small details about 'the interns' because Maehrer never explains why a secret lair has interns, just has them be there and causing trouble in the background. This book made me laugh and that's worth a lot.

settiai

Welp. The last few days were certainly exhausting.

Don't get me wrong, the long weekend of D&D was a ton of fun, and I'm very glad that we managed to pull it off. That said, it was extremely draining on me even after I spent as much time as possible prior to it trying to charge my internal batteries. By the time we ended yesterday afternoon, my spoons were long gone.

Since I had to get up early to catch the bus to E&Z's place (which was on the weekend schedule the entire time since Friday was a holiday) and then it was usually 1am or so before I made home at night, I didn't get nearly enough sleep pretty much the entire time. Especially since I record summary videos for this game, so I had to get that done at night before I could go to bed.

I ended up taking a nap after I made it home yesterday, and the only thing preventing me from doing so tonight is that I know it will be better to push through and go to bed early instead. If I nap now, I'll be up half the night.

And then work today made things even more fun, but that's a story for another post. 🙃

ETA: Or, you know, I could decide take a nap after all because it hit 7:30pm, and my brain had completely stopped functioning. I'm still tired, so hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep at a decent hour despite the nap.

Current Mood: drained

starspray

( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Young Volcanoes - Fall Out Boy

brickhousewench

Saturday and Sunday were devoted to getting MOAR shit done around the house.

This weekend I tried to do at least one 20/10 in each room of the house (that's another UFYH trick).

In the bedroom I took down the Christmas lights in the sunroom, because someone complained about them (technically they’re illegal, but other people have way more fugly illegal junk on their balconies and decks, it’s just that my simple white Christmas lights are at eye level as you walk into our building. Then I weeded the T-shirt drawers, because I’d gotten to the point where I have too many t-shirts to be able to fit them in the dresser and they’ve been piling up on my bedroom chair. Then I weeded the bra drawer, and got rid of anything that I don’t wear or is too stretched out. Then I weeded the underwear drawer and tossed a couple of pairs where the elastic was starting to fail.

I called Mom around lunchtime on Saturday to tell her really quick about an article I’d read that I thought would interest her. We only chatted for a few minutes, because they were busy with their after lunch card game. But then she called me back around 3:00 to let me know that they’d had an offer on the condo they've been trying to sell for months now. And mom accepted before dad could dither too long about it. So yay, the second condo is finally sold!

After mom called me the second time I realized that I was pretty tired. I started exercising this week, and between that and all the housework on Friday, my body was pretty cranky with me. So I had a snack and sat in the Comfy Chair for about two hours. Then I had a long shower and washed my hair, because I wasn’t fit for polite company at that point. The hot shower also helped loosen up my tight back.

I threw in a load of laundry and decided to pretty much call it a day once I got that all folded and put away (which is why the t-shirt drawer got weeded).

Sunday I tried to fix the vacuum, because it’s been clogged and wasn’t sucking. But it turns out it wasn’t clogged, it’s just on its last legs. I ordered a new vacuum, but it won’t be here until Wednesday at the earliest. And my carpets are just grotty, and now I have to wait a couple more days for the new vacuum to come in (and for me to make time to assemble it) before I can do the Hoovering. BAH! I might have to vacuum every day for a week once it arrives, just to see how much dirt I can get up before I pull out the steam cleaner and tackle the stains.

Not being able to vacuum really threw me off, and I can’t say that I got as much done as I’d hoped after I discovered that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it. But I did spend a lot of time just putting random things away, trying to clear some surfaces. Hanging up clothes, shelving books, putting things back in their cabinets or drawers. And things are starting to look SO much better around here. I’ve been slowly getting caught up on tidying, but this weekend was a big leap forward in that I got through enough tidying to actually get to do some cleaning before I ran out of steam. I wouldn’t quite call the house “clean” right now, but the kitchen and bedroom are SO MUCH better than they were at the beginning of the weekend. If I can get in a couple more productive weekends this summer, I will be quite pleased with myself.

This week (month?) I’ll be taking a crack at the books and papers in the living room. I’d really like to move down at least one more photo on the hoarding reference scale. Just to be clear, I don’t think my kitchen or bedroom has ever been worse than a three, but the living room? My living room is probably about a five right now. And I’d like to get it down to a three. But that means purging boxes and papers and books. So purging stuff out of the living room is going to be my ongoing project for the rest of the summer.

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Percy

April 2019

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Page Summary

brickhousewench - Getting Shit Done
sartorias - Old-timey regency romances
seekingferret - All the Fanfic Panels at Worldcon 2025
brickhousewench - Clean All The Things!
starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty Seven
settiai - Titansfall D&D: Summary for 7/13 Game
cimorene - Reading adventures
settiai - Pyra Cantha D&D: Summary for 7/11 Game
starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty Six
settiai - Weekend Plans
starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty Five
settiai - Aurendor D&D: Summary for 7/9 Game
brickhousewench - I have done a thing!
brickhousewench - WTF Wednesday - Home Owners Association fees
sartorias - It's Wednesday! And I've been reading!
brickhousewench - It's here!
seekingferret - (no subject)
settiai - Post-D&D Crash
starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty Four
brickhousewench - Weekend Update - Getting Shit Done

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