jinian

This morning I went to the Reptile Expo with Wim! Lots of great herps, including beautiful snakes with intriguing recessive genes. I loved that so many of them were sold with zygosity information, too. Aaaaand, ultimate cuteness again resides in my home: I got another baby axolotl. Hachiko! Number word beginning with H (Japanese 8 is hachi), to go with Hex, and the Shibuya Station Hachiko was a dog while axolotls are called "water dogs" sometimes. She has wild-type coloration and also GFP, green fluorescent protein; it's hard to see in her body without applying black or 405-nm light, but her pupils shine green instead of black. Pics soon. She's only about three inches long and has beautiful fluffy gills. Still too small to sex really, so her gender is merely grammatical.

Then we met up with rysmiel (and very briefly elynne), and got lunch at Hana then dessert at Dilettante. A wild m-pig appeared, and we all went to the lab real quick, then the Taiwanese Student Association's yearly Night Market. This year's available grass jelly was neither a hot drink nor a cold drink, but just the jelly itself in a cup. We also had tasty popcorn chicken, beautiful tea eggs, delicious watermelon juice, and some pork-mushroom rice in a leaf that I didn't try, but we were too full from before to do justice to the early short lines. Then there was sitting on the grass talking, which on my part involved being really tired, and I took people home.

Now: Hachi into her tank, cats on me, gin + Limonata, maybe Azumanga Daioh.

Would anyone like a Year of the Snake card? From Japan until I run out, then I'm sure I can find more cute ones locally. :) There are also stickers!

I am currently v. disorganized, so I may not have your address even if I totally should. Put them in comments (all are screened) or email to jinian@.

• What are you currently reading?

Invader! Jago is so cute. Whatever the atevi equivalent of a massive crush is, she definitely has it.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Foreigner, of course. Wow, those intro sections remain unhelpful. Having written atevi POV such that it was not obviously alien kind of undermines the perceptual and emotional differences the rest of the series hinges on. (Also mecheiti are spelled wrong sometimes even this early, argh. Spellcheck will learn words, people!)

Something which I have just sent off in a package as a hopefully-welcome surprise.

Also Yuletide including:

Lesbian Saffy

Crossing the streams of Nina Hoffman's early novels

A lost episode of Community
(also adorable and hot Troy/Abed/Annie smut fics, one of which is hilariously in character)

And "Friendship is Optimal" was much more interestingly creepy than the offhand rec had led me to expect.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

That would be Inheritor, which I guess I should get from the library. Either we don't have books 2-9 or I just can't find them; either is fairly likely.

I want something fluffier for tandem reading. Not sure what yet.

Sunset tonight, clear and chill and soothing with a first-quarter moon.

Pinafored little girls stompling in the ground cover on campus.

The lovely gloves I got in Kyoto last weekend: dark brown leather with lime-green topstitching, lined with lime-green knit, matching my adorable new umbrella.

My two packages from people, especially as I now have my heating pad. (Not thankful for damned customary holiday cramps; maybe this is early enough I'll be okay for Xmas.)

Ebook companies that pay attention to my billing address rather than my IP address.

All you great people that I know.

Getting to live in Japan for three months, damn, how cool is that.

Chocolate cake for my roommate's birthday.

A map of words for pillbugs.

Science!

Beautiful things to make, admire, have, and give.

Saturday afternoon: Went to a little mall full of Japanese stores. Ate donburi, bought adzuki cream buns, then went to get sewing stuff to repair some evil jeans.

Came home from that and crashed for a bit. Then there was godlike French toast. (Note that I got to eat rushthatspeaks' cooking multiple times, while you likely did not.)

After dark it was still unmanageably hot in the house, so we went out to a re-created fort to experience wind and coolness, which were very nice, and a view of Boston, which was pretty but didn't alleviate my geographic confusion.

Sunday: Breakfast of adzuki cream bun! Delicious. Sitting around sewing and reading can be assumed for all morning times.

Lunch at Mu Lan (Taiwanese) with very good crispy salted chicken and the most gorgeous basil eggplant. The fried basil with the chicken was done using sufficiently advanced technology. A birthday present was acquired and the kitchen is now much more comfortable.

When we were getting ready to go see Moonrise Kingdom, a cat carrier was needed for the outdoors cat to go to the hospital, which was worrisome; he remained poorly the last I heard. The movie was absolutely wonderful, though.

I'm sure I am not the first houseguest to be doing the mending, though it certainly doesn't seem very modern of me. I will fix my sweetie's jeans when I get home, too; it's only fair.

Also from today: Gotye getting the last word.

Monday: We were extras in a movie! There was ice cream (blackberry-lime and vanilla in my case), and new people to meet, and a bizarre MIT dorm, and much walking in the heat (so that I had to be a heroic drink-getter at the Whole Foods, which was strangely Trader-Joe's-like). We also saw an amazing hearse.



(It's a little hard to see, but those are purple velvet drapes with leopard-print bands, and there's a white coffin in there.)

Also gaudior got back, yay.

Tuesday: Grocery shopping, should have taken a nap but streamed some live Yaz and R.E.M. instead, then stayed up until 3am making bao and birthday cake. Also cramps, ugh.

And then Wednesday I had to come home. Such a good trip!

Final installment of reading list:
- Finder: Voice (among the best)
- Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (holy shit Raccoona Sheldon was hard core)
- Wigwam Bam (reading all of these eventually piecemeal)
- Drops of God v3-4 (Oishinbo-style wine-geeking meets Yakitate!! Japan for insane reactions though thank god less punny; m-pig, I trust your friend E reads this already?)
- Japan As Seen By 17 Creators (highlights: Aurelia Aurita, Fabrice Neaud, Etienne Davodeau, Kan Takahama, really just about all of them)

Readercon's apology was actually appropriate, and I am likely to attend in the future to support them.

As per my text from Wim last night, "Holy crap the skycrane actually worked".

(Unrelated but unmissable: Tron prom dress eee!)

Up early due to light sleeping, I went down to Heteronormativity in YA SF and ate my blueberry bread there. Good panel -- lots of YA dystopias mentioned and critiqued, the passivity of the titles right now (so many of which are past participles), Delirium mentioned as actually referring to homosexuality ("unnaturalism"), appearance policing even when there's no romantic choice possible, overt reproductive or sexual pressures.

[I got Delirium at the library today and was surprised at how good it is. Sure, the whole reason Ordinary Girl questions her dystopia is presented as being An Outsider Boy With Golden Eyes, but there is a lot more going on than that -- some good slow reveals of just how fucked up things are, decent worldbuilding, and lots of relationships among women and girls.]

Geek Girls and Self-Objectification panel: already complained about it. Check out http://doctorher.com/?p=1208 for an updated presentation by Courtney Stoker on the same subject as the panel's source material.

Lunch: more delicious farmer's market bounty, hanging with roommate and her friends.

Reproductive Justice: lots about the different things this can mean, not just the ability to decide when to be pregnant, but access for both parents, the ability not to fear your kids will be taken into foster care, and more interesting issues. Mostly not that SFnal, though we got into some works at the end. The Testament of Jessie Lamb won awards, but the premise is appalling (pregnancy kills you! your choices are to die before or after the baby is born; also you are comatose at the time!) and one of the awards is the Man Booker Prize, so enough about that forever. It did remind me of The Clockwork Rocket, which I recommended. And in When She Woke by Hilary Jordan the scarlet A is for abortion and covers your entire skin.

Shoujo Fairy Tales: Obviously Princess Tutu was the queen of this panel, and I tweeted Håll Om Mig Nu as a panel summary. (yes, I rewatched it when I did that, taking betsy somewhat aback when she came in to very loud music partway through; and yes, I also rewatched it right now; and yes, I still got chills both times.) A few notes on Japanese fairy tales: Natsume Yuujinchou, Xxxholic, Kamichu; Susan Napier, Thomas Lamar.

[Don't go looking for my Twitter account expecting content or anything; it's just for Twit-specific things.]

I debated chilling in the room at that point, since I was tired, but found myself unable to chill while Eleanor Arnason was reading something. The thing that killed me dead at the Aqueduct reading, though, was Liz Henry's poem about the moon landing. Kiini Ibura Salaam's stories were very good, too. And this is where the Wiscon Chronicles explaining Moonfail were explained aloud. I bought all three books.

Dinner with boxofdelights, who knows me too well, at Buraka. Wonderful as always. Quick stop at Ragstock for a shirt to go with my other silk clothing-swap skirt; I genderfloomped femme this year, which I had basically planned, if only through thinking men's clothes are too hot for dancing in.

When we came in, the line for the dessert salon was still going in, and it was halfway through its timeslot. Why people do that I will never understand. I went away for a little while, came back and got leftovers (seedy strawberry-rhubarb crumble and perfect blackberry panna cotta), and watched the speeches just fine. Really liked Andrea Hairston's about SF and expectations, and bucking them to fulfill SF's promises in her own way.

After that I danced all the things. Once again I fail at dancing with people, but I think I can sometimes tell when they want to now? If you grab my hands, even I will definitely clue in, though I am still crap at doing anything about it. (Sorry, S!) The "cops" -- probably hotel security -- came by to legitimize our rocking at about 2am, and we broke it up around 2:30.

Yay grad recruitment, that brings us 80s night at Dante's. My feet hurt, my knees and hips are like to hurt later (took aspirin already), and I am kinda limp, but my only actual complaint is that it was really 80 (+/- 15)s night.

I made a shirt and wore it! People liked it! People liked my dancing! My friends were there! It was awesome! Yay again!

Whee argh. I got my reports all sent out last night, I have a presentation ready to go, room and projector are reserved. I got pastries at Pike Place (Le Panier), which is actually a lovely grounding thing to do in the morning. Still NERVOUS. Petting Capybara-san for strength.