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When I'm traveling I bring a travel electric kettle, because I hate when my tea tastes like hotel coffee. I don't bring loose tea and a teaball, or even disposable teabags, because that's too much mess/hassle for a temporary space.

Instead I drink bag tea. Usually Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey, though this time it's Bigelow Constant Comment because I haven't had that in at least a decade.

Today I realised: I drink flavoured tea when I'm traveling because the questionable flavouring masks the sense that the tea itself just isn't that good.

Better than No Tea, though.

>INVENTORY

You are carrying:
No tea

>TAKE TEA

No tea: dropped.

--Adams/Meretzky, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Tags:

travel

In the event I made it through customs easily. My customs agent was a dead ringer for grumpy John Cena. He asked for my citizenship (US) and passport. and then glared at the passport and his comupter screen for about thirty seconds. I had enough time to start getting nervous and also to notice that his biceps were the size of my head before he handed my passport back without a word. I'll count that a win.

I'm in Niagara, at the Gathering, saying hi to folks and playing a bunch of games. There's sufficient variety and sufficiently pleasant social that even when I get stuck in a 2.5-hour game that is emphatically Not For Me it's still a decent time. And it's good to see people I know and who know me, and to feel, well. At home, maybe.

They've been issuing special black badges for folks who've been to at least twenty of these since before I started coming (which was I think number 24 or 25). Last year or this they started giving 'grey' badges to people who've been to at least ten, and I was a little startled to realise that yep, that's me. I'm pretty bad at recognising when I've become A Regular at a thing. In my head I'm stuck as The New Guy, there's plenty of folks who've been around longer than I have.

It's Sunday night. Four and a half more days of gaming and Gathering, and then Steph gets here for two and a half days or so, and then homeward. I do miss my kitten. I don't miss the rest of home, not yet, but I can see that from here. For now, things are good. I appreciate that.

Tags:

gathering,
travel

Hey, if you are going to theatres to see movies these days, I can highly recommend Sinners, with Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld. It's about twin brothers (played by Jordan) who return to their town in Mississippi in 1932 to open a juke joint, and run up against vampires. I'm not much of a vampire person at all, but I think this would probably satisfy both the vampire loving crowd as well as the crowd like me, because the whole first hour is mostly a slow build of who the twins are and who the people in their lives are, and what's happened to them to make them what they are (not the least of which is of course generational trauma from racism), and also background for the character who becomes central to both their story and to the vampires' story.

The music is fucking off the charts amazing (Ludwig Göransson does the soundtrack and a lot of the music stuff) and worth it alone. There are two music sequences that left me kind of gobsmacked. I've never seen anything like it.

There's definitely gore and jump scares, but overall I didn't find it too horror-y, more like a modern monster movie in terms of the violence and such. It was definitely R-rated, with some very sexual scenes. Anyways, if you were considering it, I loved it. (It was directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame.)

Tags:

movies

Watch on YouTube

Tags:

fandom: music

- Tuesday involved me getting up earlier than usual because I had to go to the office for an in-person working session on the thing I presented last week. We got a lot done and have a plan, yay. I also learned a non-work thing: I am WAY more sensitive to garlic than I thought, especially if it's uncooked. I felt inflammation coming on as I was heading back home in the evening, and woke up on Wednesday feeling AWFUL. When do I get the good side effects of being a vampire? When?

- I am, as usual, doing a lot of window shopping. This pink hat with black bats and moons calls to me, of course, but then I decided I could DIY something even more suited to me. Thanks to AliExpress, I have a pink hat with an even wider brim and a bunch of black lace bat appliques. This coming weekend will involve painting the hat with a darker pink alcohol dye, then attaching the appliques. And maybe wide ribbons (attached to the inside of the crown) so I can tie it on if I want.

- I'm also coveting this sterling silver choker with a giant quartz centerpiece, but it's out of my price range. But it's so pretty!

- I'm thinking of taking a day off from work and persuading the Stroppy One we should go to the zoo. The things that are giving me pause are 1) the Stroppy One is about to start deadline work, and 2) the local zoo is very hilly, and will be challenging for me. (There's a part of me that thinks making the trek to Seattle to go to Woodland Park may be a better idea, especially since I could go visit my beloved red pandas. Our local zoo doesn't have red pandas.)

- All in all, things are meh around here, but I'm trying to find things that make me happy. I hope you peeps are also finding things that bring you joy.

Well. I just had the fastest checkin / security experience I've ever had at YVR: no one in line ahead of me to check in, two slightly slow people in the fast line at security. I think the time from stepping off the train to thru security was on the order of ten minutes, and most of that was walking from one end of the domestic terminal to the other and back again.

The gate isn't empty, but it's not as crowded as I expect the Toronto redeye to be. I'm okay with that.

What are you reading now?

Just started Melissa Scott's Dreamships, about which I know pretty much nothing except that Steph is a fan of Scott's work. (I think I read one or two of hers before moving here but they did not survive the Great Cross-Country Purge.) It's enjoyable so far.

What did you just finish reading?

For some reason I had a strong desire to read Gene Wolfe's four-volume crypto-Catholic generation-ship epic Book Of The Long Sun. I think this is somehow only my second reread; might be my third. I can confirm that the crypto-Catholicism is ... not really all that crypto. On the other hand the ending of "and then a bunch of us got on the lander and went down to the planet, and it turned out the Pope had been a vampire from the neighbouring Vampire Planet all along, the end" is more telegraphed than I remember. Though it helps if you remember the Pope really is a vampire from a previous read. (Er. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old tetrology, I suppose, though honestly if you're paying attention you find out the Pope is a vampire early in the second or third book.)

These are very Wolfean books, by which I mean they excel at doing the thing where something happens that means one thing to the characters in the book and quite another to the reader. They also have an awful lot of scenes of the main character explaining things to other people, which is less fun. But they're good, and there's not much out there like them.

Before that, Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. I like these a little less on this read, I think. Partly it's that they're overflowing with characters that I have difficulty telling apart. Partly it's that they lean into the fantasy trope of The Evil Race. The final duology tries to undermine that, with the hybrid queen whose name escapes me but who is trying so hard... but then Wells brings in the groundling race who've decided that killing everyone else is fine if it means it kills off all the evil Fell as well. They're still enjoyable, they still have great characters with complex and real-feeling relationships. Just ... not quite as solid as I'd like.

What do you think you'll read next?

Beats me. Something else in ebook, since I only brought one paper book (Wells's City Of Bone). When I get home I may read Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, the sequel trilogy. Or I may not; I remember it as being extremely depressing, mostly because it's narrated by someone who's not sure who he is and is extremely depressed about it.

Tags:

books,
travel

Practicum complete. It hit me harder than expected at the end of last week. Plenty of possible reasons. Biggest, I think, was "this was supposed to be a pathway to a Real Job and it was instead a dead end," and there's not anything I can do about that. So that set off ... not really a full-blown depressive episode, I don't think. A sort of low-key moodiness. Days later I'm still sad that it couldn't work out but not overwhelmingly so.

On Friday I returned to Whistler for the fifth(!) and final round on my tattoo. I'm quite happy with it. It's larger and brighter than I'd expected it to be, but I'm okay with that. And it does look good. Red maple on the outside of the calf, aspen on the inside, both in full fall foliage, with a kudzu vine twining around the leg. This last session finished up the maple and a couple of last kudzu leaves. It hurt like hell for a couple of days; now it's just itchy. And a bit startling, whenever I look down.

After some thought I'm anxious about going to Niagara, but I'm not, for the most part, scared. I'm angry, and it's easy for that to sink into, well, depressive fatalism, because there's not anything I can do about it. I try to talk to folks who can keep my perspective grounded in reality. That seems to help somewhat.

I feel like the horrific ICE news stories are radicalizing me in a similar fashion to Abu Ghraib twenty-one years ago. I'm mostly okay with that. Just need to figure out a useful way to point it this time.

There's a bit in The Good Place where Chidi tells Eleanor about the idea that toddler-mentality is (I'm paraphrasing, probably badly) "me not you" and a more mature line of thought is "us not them". I feel like the great lefty/progressive project is to move beyond even that, to break down the divide of 'them'.

Six years ago a fellow named Frank Wilhoit coined a phrase that's been called Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This pithy expression wasn't the point of his comment; that was a later bit, that I've been thinking on a lot lately. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Tomorrow I wrap up a homework assignment, do a bunch of dishes, pack, and then head out for nearly two weeks. I'm gonna miss Mr Tuppert. He's been mostly friendly and affectionate the past couple of days.

Perhaps I'll have some answers when I come back.

Tags:

- The work presentation that I was working on last week that caused me so much anxiety and stress ended up going really well, and my team has approval to move forward with a dream project. Tomorrow is a big in-office working session about the project with some other stakeholders and my writer who will be driving this, which means I need to trek into Seattle. I'm not thrilled about that part, but there are some people I'm especially looking forward to catching up with.

- Because of all of this last week, I ended up having a two and a half day seesawing panic attack, which I'm still recovering from. I couldn't do my usual way of recovering from such a thing, sleeping for an extended period, because I had social obligations. WHICH WERE AWESOME, but I'm still feeling the aftereffects of last week. In other words, I want to go be a sloth on the couch and then sleep in.

- I saw my big brother this weekend and got a tarot reading. Nothing like having the powers that be drop anvils on my head that I need to stop listening to the Brain Raccoons. Thanks. Yes, I constantly need the reminder, but DAMN.

Does anyone know what this character is?

It's not a full stop! It breaks html that needs a full stop.

Also, how did I end up using it? I must have accidentally copied it? From somewhere?

Haven't done one of these in a while and ended up having to trim out stuff that happened a month ago.

( U.S. Politics )

There is not a Canadian Politics section because I find our election too depressing. Here's a good interview on The Breach. Which came out before the NDP started to properly implode. Fuck.

Cool/Fun Stuff:
JSTOR Companion to the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List.
JSTOR has created an open library to support readers seeking to engage with BIPOC+Q-authored reading lists like the one developed by the New York Public Library.

CBC: 46 Canadian nonfiction books to read in spring 2025.
I don't remember why I bookmarked this, because I'm not going to look at it again, lol.

Oglaf: Historical Adventure.
One NSFW panel, best summary of The Three Musketeers I've ever seen.

The Wiggles and Orville Peck: Friends of Dorothy 🦖💕.
No notes.

National Theatre's The Importance of Being Earnest: 'I'm particularly fond of muffins' & 'Mr. Ernest Worthing is engaged to me!'

CBC: These are the 1st images of humpbacks having sex, and they're both males.

Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni:
I'd be depressed about Depp v. Heard repeating itself, except Lively isn't stuck with bargain basement lawyers, so it's going rather better for her. (Okay, so, "whoever has the most expensive lawyers wins" is a terrible system, but it's at least mildly satisfying when the person you want to win has the most expensive lawyers and the better case.) I've been spending probably too much time following this because I want the win. Not that invested in the actors, but am invested in harassment-free workplaces. ( Read more... )

Various YouTube Videos:

CaelanConrad: J. K. Rowling: The Real Story.
From 'homeless single mother with unheated shoebox apartment' to 'self-made billionaire feminist', PR spin and reality diverge.
Mostly about how the Rags to Riches mythology got overblown, with various other digs along the way.

OlurinattiBITES: The Problem with Jonathan Majors’ Redemption Tour.
This is like one of those encores where the performers don't even bother to leave the stage.

JoshJohnsonComedy: Adolescence Is #1 on Netflix—and It’s Got the Manosphere Shook.
Title's a bit clickbaity, this summary is better: The show deals with topics like the manosphere, red pill, incels, and the coded language teenagers use to communicate ideas around the topics. This set reminded me of my own struggles as a young man and how things could have gone very differently for me. It's very funny, and very warm-hearted and sweet, given the topic.

Tags:

but trying to at least read Stephanie Jones' lawyers' Plaintiffs’ Memorandum of Law in Support of Their Motion to Dismiss Jennifer Abel’s Counterclaims and Certain Affirmative Defenses because of the whole Lively v. Baldoni saga, the PR firm fighting itself is by far the best part.

I cannot believe that Jennifer Abel, a genuine adult in her 30s (I think?), making low six figures in a cut-throat industry:

When hired by Jones transferred her personal number, that she'd had since high school, to her new work phone.

Had no other phone besides her work phone, and thus used her work phone for two-factor authentication for all her personal shit.

Decided to steal her company's clients and sensitive documents (I actually can believe this part, see above about cut-throat industry).

Used her work phone and work laptop to plot and carry out said theft.

Used her work phone to text her buddies about how well said theft was going.

Was a surprised Pikachu when her boss found out about all this and fired her.

Was a surprised Pikachu when her boss took her work phone and work laptop.

THEN SUED HER FORMER BOSS FOR UNFAIR TREATMENT.

The subsidiary of "Don't take notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy" should 100% be "ESPECIALLY ON A DEVICE YOU DON'T OWN!!!" holy shit.

2025 Hugo Award Finalist list is out.

Meh? None of the novels I nominated made it through. I've added three on Libby, but am deeply welmed by the choices. I'll track the rest down after I move.

Several of my novellas did, which is nice, but I was kinda "I guess?" about the whole list. It's (almost) all Tor again (cue someone angrily telling me that Tor and TorDotCom are not the same publisher! OMG! How dare people say they are!?)

I'll get the novelettes and short stories in the package.

I'm genuinely stoked that Rebecca Roanhorse's excellent trilogy is on the series list.

Some of the graphic novels look cool!

Uh... don't care about a lot of the other categories? I guess I'll see what's in the package (my vibe for a lot of this, as I was saying elsewhere).

Haven't seen any of the movies. The wrong Doctor Who episodes made it through! INJUSTICE! lol

Oh! Semiprozine is stacked (as it usually is).

I love that there's a poetry category this year.

Is Iron Widow YA? I keep getting told it's not. But a lot of the Lodestar books look cool, so I'm checking them out.

This came out a while ago, and I was like, "Do I really need to post every single thing Raye does?" before watching it ten million times and deciding, "Yes, yes I do."

Watch on YouTube

It's Raye's song, and she and Lisa and Doja Cat just kill it, and I would read the fic. I don't want to break my youtube algorithm by searching for this, but does anyone know videos or essays that take apart songs (specifically this one) and explain why they work?

I'm not really posting here much beyond music lately, I guess. I have a handful of book reviews I should get to eventually. Probably. I read seven in March, and am currently reading a deeply mid cosy fantasy out of pure inertia, but the Network Effect audiobook just came in from the library!

Relatedly, I've really been enjoying being excited about the Murderbot show, and am trying to avoid anyone being negative about it. I'd appreciate cut tags? I'm staying out of comment sections other than my own (where everyone's been lovely). I don't mean to be a princess, but I'd just really like to hang onto this as my happy place. RL things have Not Been Great.

New Doctor Who in a couple days, which I'm looking forward to! (Speaking of Ncuti, no sign of him on the NT steaming site yet.)

I watch and enjoyed the first episode of season three of SurrealEstate (I'm not clear who the main cast is this season? Is it just Luke, Susan and Lomax? Are the others coming back full time? Phil seems to be gone gone). I feel like Luke's family drama being the arc plot every season might get old?

Otherwise, I've kinda been drifting.

A couple times I downloaded merge three games onto my phone, and hyper focused on them for hours until I had to delete them because I couldn't just play them a little bit. I'm sure there's science about how they're engineered to be addictive, but I was impressed either way.

Bird watching has kind of been my main thing lately. I try to go for a one or two kilometre walk every day to count all the birds I see. It's been really nice to get outside and reset my brain, and the migrations are happening so there are many birds. It'll probably stop once I move after Easter, but maybe I can get back into being churchy at that point.

Someday I might write again. I used to be good at that.

Tags:

Watch on YouTube

marthawells has been linking to articles with promo pictures and interviews.

tea!

gathering successfully

Movie rec

Music Friday

(no subject)

travel and books

there's a hole inside my head where all the thoughts hang out

A list of random things

Very random question

Links: US Politics, Fun Stuff, Lively v. Baldoni, Misc

somewhat scattered this morning...

Hugo Shortlist

Music, updates on the state of fannishness.

Murderbot!

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