jinian | Network

Woke at what I thought was 9:30, didn't want to get up then so floated for a bit, then did All The Exercises, then went downstairs to get my breakfast. And the kitchen clock said 9:30. Battery must be dying, I thought, but the second hand still ticked away happily. When I got back upstairs, yeah, kitchen clock was right and I'd been awake since 8:30. Hence why I'm yawning at 10 p.m.

Well and also because I did indeed wash the stairs today, even if I had to stop halfway and take muscle relaxants for the back. I think the candle wax stains are there for good even if I scraped the actual wax off. Unfortunately used the wrong Dr. Bronner's so the house now smells of tea tree oil. But anyway, stairs are as clean as my arthritic elbows can get them.

Midafternoon I took a load of towels and pillowcases and fleeces to the laundromat, so that's also out of the way. Must go back eventually to do a cold wash of the velour throw that I use on the sofa in winter, which is too heavy for my ancient washing machine, but that can wait. And finally went out in the evening coolness and cut down more vines from the back fence, which I will bag up eventually. Daytime temps and humidity are rising so not going to do this during the day, but we're at the happy time of year when it's light after eight and I shall make the most of it. I heard Oliver barking indoors, oddly enough, because he's usually out in the yard. I fancy SND is away, possibly getting married, and she has a dogsitter in. Certainly I haven't seen him running around his yard lately.

So though I much prefer sitting on the couch with the fan and beanbags, I think I've moved sufficiently today.

torachan

1. This morning when I was out for my walk I encountered a coyote!

They've been getting more and more common in the neighborhood in recent years, so I knew they were around, and it's one reason among many I would never allow any of our cats to free roam outdoors (I worry enough about Tuxie). But this guy was just doing his thing, trotting along the sidewalk and even looked both ways before crossing the street. There were several other people out dog-walking, but not a lot of cars yet (it was around 7am). He didn't seem interested in any of the dogs or people, and I lost sight of him after a couple blocks. I wish they weren't around because it's not good that their habitat has been so encroached upon, and it's not safe for smaller animals, but I am glad I finally saw one in person. It made my day.

2. I checked the Hyundai website and the incentives for this month are not as good as May, but it's not that much lower, so we've decided we're going to go ahead with a new one, since the used prices aren't significantly lower unless we go for one with a lot more mileage on it. Right now we're planning on going back to the dealership this weekend so we may have a new car soon!

3. Stretch!

lannamichaels

The dilemma: the Postal Service's song Such Great Heights. Is the line "they will see us waving" or "they won't see us waving". On listening to the official release, it's pretty swallowed and I go either way although I think "they will" makes more sense in context.

Lyrics videos differ.

Live version, 2013 sounds a lot like "won't". Okay but that has instruments, let's pull up an unplugged... okay that's "will". But that's 2023 and also it is common for bands in general to sing lyrics differently live.

There's also a known issue with several artists, of which I will not name names (Bob Dylan), where the official lyrics are clearly different from what is sung in the officially recorded version, so I'm hesitant in this case to trust any lyrics websites without knowing where they're scraping it from.

I assume at some point, this was officially clarified?

I can't even list this under my misheard lyrics nonsense, this one is not my fault and it has been not my fault for 23 years. I really think it's "will" but "won't" is a very cromulent hearing of their pronunciation.

cyphomandra

Hickory Dickory Dock, Agatha Christie (1955)
Third Girl, Agatha Christie (1966)
The Rowan, Anne McCaffrey (re-read)
After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian
The face in the frost, John Bellairs
Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke
The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica
Trial run, Dick Francis
Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher
The tournament, Matthew Reilly
Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read)
How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White

Hickory Dickory Dock & Third Girl, Agatha Christie. Tidying up some Agathas. Hickory and Third Girl are definitely in Christie’s “modern times are rather poor stuff and the young people all wear terrible clothes” era, and while it is interesting to read her take on student hostels (Hickory) and flat sharing (Third Girl), Hickory has a lot of unexamined racial stereotypes and actual racism, and Third Girl (which I think was new to me) had a rather unbelievable denouement and a plot line in which a doctor marries his patient, which I never like.

After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian. Patrick sells books in 1968 New York, sleeps with most of the gay male population of Greenwich Village in his spare time, and on his philanthropic landlady’s prompting offers a job at the bookshop and shelter there to Nathaniel, alone and obviously traumatised but reluctant to share his past, just before Nathaniel’s sister-in-law, a famous folk singer, shows up with a week-old baby and a “your husband just died in Vietnam” telegram. I thought I was going to like this more than any other Sebastian I’ve tried so far, and I probably do, but it runs on vibes and having all its sympathetic characters be terribly politically sound, and about two-thirds of the way through it was like someone pulled out the bath plug and all the remaining tension drained out of it. But I liked it and I’d probably re-read it once, although I’d set my expectations lower.

The Rowan,Anne McCaffrey (re-read). Why am I re-reading this when I never liked this series much in the first place and if I were going to re-read any of hers it should be Dragonflight? Weakness for psychic powers and a touch of contrariness, plus I still want to find my original paperbacks rather than use the library ebook. This has good bits (the psychic powers, the training, the way in which one trainer passes on their biases and unnecessarily traps all those training under her) and a lot of terrible, terrible romance and gender opinions, and from what I dimly remember this only amplifies in subsequent books. Maybe I should try and find my McGill Feighan books if I really want to read psychics working as shipping agents to the stars.

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke. Tradwife influencer Natalie takes us, the readers/audience through a day on her idyllic farm in a way that highlights her hypocrisy (the unacknowledged/unfilmed staff, the financial backing by her right-wing in-laws, the uselessness of her husband at any farm chores means they constantly have to replace the cows, who all have the same names, etc, etc). The next day she wakes up, prepared to do it all over again - but there’s no power, no staff, no technology at all beyond the 1800s, and even her children are similar but not the same. It’s a great set-up and Natalie herself is a great, awful, character and, obviously, the true villain is the patriarchy. However I was only about 2/3rds convinced by the twist and I did think the ending moves the focus away from society to one individual’s choices in a way that lets society off a bit.

The face in the frost, John Bellairs. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and while I enjoyed it (Bellairs is so great at making even the most mundane thing superlatively creepy in only a few sentences), I might have missed the window for loving it. I like both Prospero and Roger Bacon, I love the magic and the world-building and the horror, but I found the denouement a bit too ex machina and the characters not as compelling as the leads in his children’s books.

The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica (trans. Sarah Moses). The nameless narrator is a nun in a convent of horrors that is nevertheless a sanctuary against the catastrophes that have devastated the outside world. She writes her memoirs in blood and dirt, documenting the daily torments inflicted on the nuns in the name of enlightenment, retelling her past, and, possibly, finding hope and love. I thought this overdid the tortures and horrors, but possibly I am just a hard sell on evil religious cults in post-collapse dystopias. I would probably read another by the same author but it looks like the other one currently out is industrial cannibalism, which is not really my thing.

Trial run, Dick Francis. One I have not previously read! Possibly there are others out there but I don’t really want to check in case there aren’t. Ex-steeplechaser Randall Drew (unable to compete now that he needs glasses) reluctantly travels to Moscow on behalf of the royal family, who want to ensure that one of the equestrian team about to compete in the Moscow Olympics will not be tainted by a rumoured scandal. The good bits in this are all the bits about Moscow - I can see Dick and Mary on their tour there with a bunch of notebooks and their cameras - but unfortunately the spy/conspiracy plot does creak rather and there is a surprising lack of horses, although there are classic Francis bits with a fall into a freezing Moscow river and a limited and insufficient supply of antidote to a fatal poison (and also the most doomed proposal sequence ever, even for Francis).

Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher. Reprint of previously self-published fantasy, with a goblin troop catapulted by magic out of a war and into a distant forest with an elf who is basically James Herriot and a mysteriously abandoned village. This is more Pratchetty than others of hers (as well as Herriotish) and it’s a fun read with a bit more going on underneath. The villain didn’t quite work for me but the magical creature vet problems are good.

The tournament, Matthew Reilly. Young Elizabeth I travels to Constantinople with her tutor, Roger Ascham, to watch a chess tournament between the representatives of the great and powerful; they are then caught up in investigating a murder. This is not Reilly’s natural territory (no clockwork building-sized traps with nifty diagrams) and although he flings himself into the research with enthusiasm, it’s not really his natural element. As with The Detective, Reilly also has a particular issue that he wants the reader to understand is Evil, and while with The Detective it was racism, here it’s pedophilia; there is an evil ring of Catholic priests exploiting children, yoked uneasily to a plot line in which Elizabeth’s companion, Elsie, describes her consensual sexual escapades in the pursuit of the local prince in a luridly detailed fashion to Elizabeth, only to have the prince dump Elsie in a brothel chained to a bed once he sleeps with her, thus making the young Elizabeth swear off sex forever. The detective bits are all right.

Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read). I was on a roll. The TV episode is more compelling than the book but I still find both fundamentally bland; possibly I am just too traumatised by fannish coffee shop AUs to ever enjoy sassy smoothie maker/customer convinced smoothie is game-winning good luck charm.

How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White. Home organisation book that does not assume you want to be an inherently tidy and organised person; surprisingly useful. Focuses on making small changes and having you explicitly acknowledge the positive impact of these, thus creating virtual circles, rather than shaming you for failing to match up to their expectations.

nevanna

As Pride Month begins, I want to acknowledge some of the formative books by and/or about queer people that I read in my youth, mostly at a point before I acknowledged that I myself probably wasn’t straight, but definitely knew what it was like to not fit in.

1. Annie On My Mind (1982) by Nancy Garden

During her first semester at MIT, Liza reflects on a romance that unfolded over the previous year, and which was complicated by a scandal that drove a wedge between Annie and herself.

In an interview that accompanied the 25th-anniversary edition of her groundbreaking novel, Garden said that reading lesbian pulp fiction and The Well of Loneliness, all of which ended in tragedy for their lesbian characters, “made me vow to someday write a book about my people with a happy ending. Annie On My Mind was that book!” She also talks about the evolution of LGBTQ+ fiction for young readers since the 1980s, and I would be very surprised if none of those later writers were similarly inspired by her work.

2. Weezie Bat (1989) by Francesca Lia Block

In a gloriously surreal version of Los Angeles, Weetzie forms a chosen family with her friend Dirk, their respective partners, and the two girls that they’re raising together.

One could technically designate Dirk as Weetzie’s “gay best friend” but I think that would be reductive, since his desires and happiness are given more or less equal narrative weight to hers. The climax of the book is actually from Dirk’s perspective, as he tracks down his love, Duck, after an AIDS scare, and they agree that despite the uncertainty that comes with their relationship, “we can’t be anywhere except together.” (My sisters and I read this book aloud to each other while on vacation last year, and we reached an unspoken consensus to give Duck the most himbo surfer voice ever.)

3. Living in Secret (1993) by Cristina Salat

When Amelia’s parents divorced, her wealthy father gained custody, but Amelia has always wished that she could live with her mother, Claire, and Claire’s girlfriend, Janey. The three of them make a plan to move to San Francisco together, but that means lying about their identities and constantly looking over their shoulders in case somebody figures out the truth and separates them again.

I definitely knew queer adults when I was a child, but I didn’t see them very often or give much thought to their personal lives, so the first time I asked my mom what “straight” and “gay” and “lesbian” meant as identities or relationships, it was because I’d read them in this book. (Since she was and is very cool, she explained the terms to me outright.) The intrigue of the story’s premise – as Amelia explores the city, makes friends to whom she has to lie constantly, and starts to consider what she might want romantically – is compelling enough on its own, but Claire and Janey’s relationship (which they have to hide from the public even in a progressive urban setting) adds texture and tension to their attempts to build a new life. Even after multiple rereads, the ending of the book has made me tear up.

4. No Big Deal (1994) by Ellen Jaffe-Gill (writing as Ellen Jaffe McClain)

Fourteen-year-old Janice’s school and hometown are shaken by rumors that her favorite teacher is gay, and when her mother joins the crusade to get Mr. Padovano fired, Janice knows that she has to stand up for what is right.

Growing up relatively sheltered in a small rural town in the pre-Internet 1990s, I learned a lot about the world and its injustices through fiction. This book gave me my first glimpse at how scary and devastating homophobic moral panics can be, both for their targets and for the surrounding community. Janice (who is plus-sized and Jewish, traits that inform her story but don’t define them) is a very sympathetic protagonist, and her rapport with Mr. P, and more fraught relationships with her mother and the school bully, are well-realized and memorable.

5. Empress of the World (2001) by Sara Ryan

During an academic summer program, aspiring archaeologist Nic falls for a beautiful dancer named Battle and faces the exhilaration and heartbreak of young love.

Although the romance between the two girls is well-written and compelling, some of my favorite scenes in Ryan’s debut novel focus on the dynamics among their friend group, which reminded me of some of my most nostalgic summer camp memories. Battle is the main character of a companion novel, The Rules For Hearts, which also offers some enjoyable and engaging moments but has a very different tone and appeal.

Honorable Mention: The Alice series (1985-2013) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Although Naylor did introduce a lesbian side character around the midpoint of her long-running series, I primarily wanted to shout it out because of Elizabeth, one of Alice’s best friends. Although Liz never identifies as any variety of queer that I can recall, I saw a lot of my own feelings – which later led me to realize that I’m on the ace spectrum – reflected in her ambivalence toward sex and relationships. I still hope to write a longer essay on this topic someday.

settiai

I really, really, really need to get caught up on Critical Role, but it's just so hard to find the time. 🙃

On Monday and Tuesday evenings, by the time I make it home from work, my brain is done for the day so watching something new-to-me is off the table. Then I have D&D on Wednesdays and Fridays, so watching anything longer than an hour or two isn't possible. Which means Thursday is my only real day to watch things after work, but it's also usually my day to run errands so... yeah.

Theoretically, I should have time on the weekends, but I've been using them to catch up on sleep lately.

Luckily, things seem to be calming down at work again as the big rush from May grads is dying down, so I'm hoping that I'll get to the point where I can start watching an episode or two throughout the day when I'm working from home and not on phone calls. I'm not holding my breath it will get to that point this week, but hey. Anything's possible.

Current Mood: hopeful

pauraque

This is part 3 of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now. [Part 1, part 2.] With this meeting we hit a slump of stories that no one really liked, which is too bad, because due to scheduling issues we may not be able to meet again for a bit. Hopefully when we return we'll find some stories that are more to our taste.

"Snake of Light" by Loki Liddle (2021)

( A man runs into trouble with some toughs at a bar, but he has powers they didn't bargain for. )

"Your Own Aborigine" by Adam Thompson (2021)

( A law is passed that Aboriginal people can't receive welfare unless they're 'sponsored' by a white Australian. )

"Five Minutes" by John Morrissey (2022)

( An editor working on an Aboriginal folktale collection tries to write a SF story about an alien race returning for a weapons cache they hid under Australia billions of years ago. )

"When From" by Merryanna Salem (2022)

( A woman is recruited for a secret time travel project to research Australian history for a movie studio. )

hrj

The Bay Area Book Festival was enjoyable and productive on Sunday, though also exhausting. I sold enough books to make it financially worthwhile, though I really need to have more realistic expectations of how many copies of Daughter of Mystery to bring versus later books in the series. I have fantasies of people buying the whole set, or already having the first book and coming back for more, but realistically that's not the way to bet. I was delighted to sell several copies of Skin-Singer and people seem to be very attracted to the cover art. Also had a number of people take my cards to follow up on the blog and podcast.

But by four in the afternoon I was thoroughly done and packed up an hour before actual closing. Crowds happened out by then so I don't think I missed anything serious. It was amusing that when I was packing up and my booth mates offered to help I had to work hard at saying yes and pointed out that I could, of course, do it all myself if I had to. One of my friends at the booth did a hands on her hips-type gesture and said, "You know that's a trauma response, right?" Yeah, I've had that pointed out before. And I'm still not quite sure how I acquired it, but I'll own it.

Several friends dropped by the booth either previously arranged or just by chance. So that was nice.

Monday I pretty much decided to vegetate. I've been able to cut back the pain meds to just Tylenol and have a couple of the oxycodone left over that I didn't need. But everything is just more tiring than usual and the most relaxing position for my arm is resting on the arm of my recliner, slightly elevated and on a padded surface. Most of the initial pain seems to be due to bruising from the operation and that is definitely going down consistently.

The one work-around that is actually going very well is using longhand plus speech-to-text to get Lesbian Historic Motif Project blogs written up. In fact, it's going so well that I need to remind myself to use this method all the time.

I have added one more bit of historic trivia to The History of Related-ivity which required consulting with the author of the source material as to how they wanted to be cited. The next serious task for that project is to come up with cover art for the book. Otherwise it's pretty much ready to go except for assigning ISBNs and maybe soliciting a couple of cover blurbs. I think I'm aiming for a August 1 publication date or thereabouts.

dhampyresa

I saw the Project Hail Mary movie and I really enjoyed it. Stupid power of friendship (and science), making me cry.

There's a line at one point about Grace's former girlfriend now being with someone named Mark, and in my head it's Mark "The Martian" Watney because that would be fucking hilarious.

languagelog_feed

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73667&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=essence-of-meaning

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73667

Below is a guest post by Robert Shackleton:

Peter Dodds and coauthors have recently published research that proposes a significant shift in the essence-of-meaning framework, which traces its lineage back to Charles Osgood’s initial efforts to use dimension reduction to quantify human meaning. The paper, “Ousiometrics: The essence of meaning aligns with a power-danger-structure framework instead of valence-arousal-dominance,” appeared in Science Advances. The abstract:

From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become widely accepted as being described by the three orthogonal dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. These essential dimensions have become the cornerstone of sentiment analysis across many fields. By reexamining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms—“ousiograms”—we find here that the essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a goodness-power-aggression-danger-structure (GPADS) circumplex framework; that large-scale English language corpora reveal a systematic bias toward safe, low-danger words; and that the power-danger-structure framework is the minimal framework that represents essential meaning. We find remarkable congruences between the GPADS framework and other spaces including mental states and fictional archetypes, and we construct and demonstrate a prototype ousiometer.

Extensions of Osgood’s original work led to a shift in the 1970s from his foundational dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) to a VAD framework that substitutes valence (or pleasure) for evaluation, arousal for activity, and dominance for potency. Dodds et al. discuss problems with the data, methods, and results in that previous work and offer significant improvements. Their main conclusion is that essence of meaning categories are more accurately characterizd by a five-dimensional framework involving goodness, power, aggression, danger, and structure (GPADS), but they also provide a three-dimensional PDS “minimal framework” emphasizing power, dominance, and structure.

A power-danger-structure framework for essential meaning seems to fit rather nicely into Lakoff and Narayanan’s model of cognitive schemas and frames, and it might also have intuitive appeal from an evolutionary standpoint. Members of a primate group inevitably have a profound interest both in potential dangers and in patterns of social dominance. But I wonder whether Dodds et al.'s third dimension, structured versus unstructured, might be better framed as animacy-inanimacy. Animacy appears to be at least as consistent with their analogy with thermodynamics as structure does, and early humans may well have interpreted much of the world through a frame of animacy, as evidenced not only by animacy as a fundamental grammatical category in many languages but also in the persistence of belief in non-human agency in most cultures, including ours.

Above is a guest post by Robert Shackleton.

Note that early work on learning semantic distances by projecting words into a meaning space based on orthogonalizing a term-by-document matric, e.g. latent semantic anaysis, was inspired by Osgood's "Semantic differential" method as well as by Gerard Salton's vector space model.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73667&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=essence-of-meaning

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73667

zero_pixel_count

Oops, I slipped.

( Kerry's running late. )

(Count the Cúchulainn references? The dog owner's name is, I admit, perhaps a little on the nose.)

schneefink

I made a friend in Hermitcraft fandom. After many months they got into a new fandom, one I wasn't familiar with.
Me, not thinking, trying to tempt them into writing more HC: You could write a crossover!
A few months later, they start writing a crossover, I volunteer to beta. So of course to understand the story I need more information, and they start sending me links and stuff...
Me, finally: oh. This was a trap. /o\
xD

douqi posting in

baihe_media

The Way Back to You (清水方至, pinyin: qingshui fang zhi), a new live action baihe drama, popped up on my radar a few weeks ago. It is currently airing on YouTube (with a new episode every Monday) and is available in its entirety to paid subscribers on iQiyi. The circumstances of its production are a bit mystery-shrouded. The production company, Lumina Entertainment, is ostensibly based in Canada. Meanwhile, its iQiyi page lists it as 'Taiwanese', but the voice acting, aesthetics and the names of the crew all scream mainland China. It's certainly been embraced as mainland Chinese by the mainland baihe audience, who have been speculating that the secretiveness and the lack of prior promotion might be a tactic to avoid drawing too much negative official attention.

You can watch the trailer here:

Watch on YouTube

And here's the synopsis, taken from the show's iQiyi page:

Shen Fang, a passionate and courageous younger girl, meets Gu Qingshui, a calm and emotionally reserved older girl. What begins as youthful, innocent affection ends in misunderstanding and separation, Years later, they reunite, navigating workplace challenges, family pressures, and social conflicts. Through mutual growth and reconciliation, they ultimately break free from societal constraints, presenting a powerful story of female self-discovery and emotional growth. This is a mature, cinematic take on the “second-chance” trope, centered on queer generational echoes, healing, and emotional reconciliation.

The show consists of six episodes of between 20 to 30 minutes each. The official YouTube channel is here (there's also a danmei drama, Dual Stars, currently airing on the same channel) and the show's iQiyi page is here.

james

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

oursin

And surely that would include realising that things were not always the exact same way they are today?

For decades, publishers have swapped out cultural references in new editions of books to appeal to younger readers. Fans aren’t always thrilled.

This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.

And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.

Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?

Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.

I was a bit beswozzled by this chap, too, though perhaps from a rather different direction. I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them?.

Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.

And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.

glitteryv

Like many ARMYS already know, western media's interviews when it comes to BTS tend to be either insipid or extremely superficial.

So I was shocked when I watched these two sit-down conversations.

FTR, Zane Lowe is someone that rubs me wrong way. Everything abt his persona reads as trying too hard to be a Cool Dude (TM) and his voice sounds v. swarmy to me. So, only the Tannies would get me to watch this 43-min video.

I will admit that he allowed the guys to answer questions and attempted to give everyone at least two questions. Despite the casual vibes, the interview itself turned out a bit more formal than not (in terms of structure), but I did enjoyed the guys' candidness.

Watch on YouTube

This next one was kind of a multimedia thing in that there was this group interview as well as ones with RM, Jin, SUGA, Hobi, Jimin, V, and Jungkook.

Gotta give props to Brian Hiatt, the journalist, for establishing a good rhythm that allowed BTS to be friendly and goofy.

Watch on YouTube

tamsin

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

rmc28

(aha, this post-by-email has finally appeared!)

Books on pre-order:

Call Me Traitor by Everina Maxwell (1 Dec)
Unrivaled (Game Changers 7) by Rachel Reid (1 Jun 2027)

Books acquired in May:

and read:
1. Darksight Dare (Penric & Desdemona) by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Grumpy Fake Boyfriend by Jackie Lau
3. Four Weddings to Fall in Love by Jackie Lau
4. Radiant Star (Imperial Radch) by Ann Leckie [1]
5. Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre 1) by Rick Riordan
6. Platform Decay (Murderbot 8) by Martha Wells [1]

[1] Pre-order

Go me, I read everything I acquired this month. I did not read a single borrowed or previously acquired book but I have two library books awaiting my attention now I'm past the month boundary.

I bought Big Red Tequila on the first day of the month but got distracted and didn't pick it up again until the last few days. Rick Riordan's adult detective Jackson "Tres" Navarre has a lot of the sass and stubbornness of his teenage demigod Percy Jackson, the book is a lot longer but the pages turn just as quickly. There are six more books in the series ...

oursin

Happy birthday,

bearshorty,

sylvaine and

trinker!

torachan

1. I got my hair cut this morning. I was worried that maybe my stylist was leaving the salon or something because I had tried to reschedule and their website was not showing any availability for her at all (like even checking several months down the line), but I think it's just that their system will only allow you to reschedule to the same day in a different week, and she changed the days she works, so since my appointment was on a Monday and she's no longer doing Mondays, it wouldn't show anything. I feel like their system used to allow you to choose a different day of the week and that's an annoying change, but there's always the option to call and reschedule that way, I guess. I'm just glad she's not leaving the salon!

2. We cleared a bit more space in the shed so it's easier to get the new bikes in and out. They're definitely a bit chonkier than our old ones (especially with them both having baskets). I had a couple fans in there that I'd been planning on putting out on the curb once it was warmer weather, so I took those out (now that we have ceiling fans in the living room and bedrooms, we don't need the stand-alone fans as much, and we've still got a couple in the house if we really need them) and some other stuff got reorganized a bit. It will be even better once I get some of the Christmas decorations transferred from the giant plastic tub they're in now to some smaller tubs that will fit on the shelves better.

3. Look at this sweet face!

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hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

Network

(no subject)

Daily Happiness

WILL THEY SEE US WAVING FROM SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS OR NOT?

Reading, May

Tuesday Top Five: Reading The Rainbow

Critical Role

This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 3]

Exploring My Limits

Project Last Chance

Essence of meaning

(no subject)

Typical fandom problems

The Way Back to You (清水方至): New Live Action Baihe Drama

Tuesday!

And I thought 'expanding one's mind' was part of the agenda

Fandom 50 S4 Post 17: BTS actually getting good interviews from western media?

Breaking vid rec

To-read pile, 2026, May

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