maplemood | Reading

It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.

Current Music: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, "Idiot Box"

sholio

I like Ken Follett's books, and I like airplanes, and I like historical books, but this one was just kind of lackluster for me, unfortunately. It kept me reading, and parts of it were very engaging, but I ended up feeling kind of "That was it?" at the end. I mean, to be fair, this book is set early in WW2 and there's a lot of war still to go, but it feels like we didn't quite get the full plot or the amount of airplane that was promised by the title. The airplane-promising title manages to be a big spoiler while not actually delivering on its promise. (Although, to be fair, I guess it did get me to read the book.)

( Spoilers in general )

troisoiseaux

Read Real Ones by Katherena Vermette, discovered via

sabotabby: a novel about about two adult sisters, who are Michif/Métis on their dad's side (this is important), grappling with the public exposure of their estranged mother's false claims of Indigenous ancestry, which she's used to build a career as an artist. I feel like most of the novels I've read tackling race-faking for profit/clout/??? in academia/the arts are biting satires - R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation - and even Louise Erdrich's The Sentence uses supernatural elements to express the violence of white people appropriating Indigenous identity; this one feels... subtler, maybe? It's very much grounded in the family drama of two sisters being betrayed and disappointed yet again by a self-absorbed mother who's betrayed and disappointed them over and over for as long as they can remember, this time playing out with a Greek chorus of op-eds and Twitter takes on a scandal now so weirdly familiar that Vermette tends to reference them obliquely rather than in detail. Really good; I especially liked how distinct the two sisters' voices were, as alternating POV characters.

Read With a Bare Bodkin by Cyril Hare, which fell short of Hare's Tragedy at Law, imo, but honestly, what wouldn't? This one had some fun concepts— set against the backdrop of a minor government agency housed in some sprawling pile for the duration of WWII, the plot kicks off with a conversation about how one of the civil servants is a mystery novelist on the side and everyone going "oooh wouldn't this office be a great setting for a murder mystery?", so it's got quite a crossover of tropes— and also the distinction of being one of the few mysteries where the author pulls a "clearly signaling something as A Clue by having the main character realize that some detail is Significant" and I actually immediately twigged to the discrepancy being hinted at and remembered where to cross-reference the detail earlier in the book, although, to be fair, this was not exactly subtly dropped, either in context or by the author to the reader.

sovay

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

Current Music: Clover County, "Ultraviolet"

osprey_archer

Joan Aiken finished the last two books in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence just before her death in 2004. The penultimate book, Midwinter Nightingale, has certain flaws that indicate a rushed or weary author, but before I discuss these flaws I do want to state that I’m very glad Aiken did write these books, as it seems right and proper that the series should come full circle with Dido and Simon at the end.

The main flaw in Midwinter Nightingale was the pacing, which is usually Aiken’s strong suit: in most of her book she packs so many happenings into a chapter that

littlerhymes and I struggled to discuss all the developments. But here, the characters spend the first half of the book wandering more or less aimlessly before the plot really kicks off.

Also, this is petty but I just have to complain, Aiken offers three separate and incompatible lengths for the time that has elapsed since King Dick’s coronation. It happened 15 years ago, as it coincided with his marriage to his (second) wife Princess Adelaide. (As it turns out, Prince Davie who died in the mines was the son of King Dick’s hitherto unmentioned first wife, which means Davie was a teenager when he went to investigate the mines, which is better than going off to investigate at the age of about five as I first thought.)

But it also happened six years ago, because that’s when Dido said she first got back to England, and as we know Dido saved the ceremony which otherwise would have been interrupted by St. Paul’s Cathedral rolling into the Thames. But then Dido mentions her adventures on the island of Aratu, which happened before her return to England, as occurring “two or three years ago.” WHICH IS IT, AIKEN? Please just stop giving us numbers.

However, it is lovely to be back with Dido again. Is is fine but she’s just not the same. I enjoyed the reappearance of Aiken’s trademark ferocious creatures in the form of a moat filled with man-eating fish and crocodiles (although I’m still so sad they killed spoiler redacted and spoiler redacted!), and also the unexpected plot point of two completely non-ferocious bears. They just want Simon to give them head massages to help them cope with the wet cold of England! Who among us has not dreamed of a bear friend?

The next (and last) book is very short, and was in fact published posthumously. I envision Aiken writing it on a legal pad in her hospital bed, and will not hold it against her if it occasionally devolves from prose into a list of bullet points.

asakiyume

This is the season when Rosa multiflora, the indomitable conqueror of roadsides and wastelands, the one who can render a pleasant meadow into an impassable, laceration-producing wall of arching, spreading, canes, puts out its flowers. Everywhere there are curtains and drifts of small, white-and-yellow blossoms, with a fragrance so intense that you breathe it in and begin to float. The whole rest of the year it's thorns and You Shall Not Pass, but right now it's Come To Me And Stay Awhile My Love.

"It's worth a little blood, isn't it? You can cede a little ground, can't you? To enjoy this moment with me now?" says the rambling rose.

Current Music: Melos Han-Tani: Give Thanks to Punctuation

dhampyresa

I was rewatching Avengers: Infinity War and it, again, struck me how bloody hypocritical Steve's "we don't trade lives" line(s) is. Friend. Pal. Bro. My man. Do you really think no Wakandan is gonna die fighting Thanos' armies. Like. Get a fucking grip, omg.

musesfool

I used decaf to make coffee granita last night, and I had it for dessert this evening along with a dollop of homemade whipped cream, and it seems to have worked out all right - no late evening side effects of caffeine that I can feel. And I think it's better later in the day as a treat than as my morning coffee, because I eat it so quickly and also it's sweet. I don't put any sugar in my regular coffee, but granita requires it so it doesn't freeze solid. I used vanilla sugar but can't really detect the vanilla (or, rather, differentiate it from the vanilla in the whipped cream).

Also, they were on sale, so I bought a pack of paper plates and they made cleanup after cooking so easy that I remembered why I used to use them regularly back before I had a dishwasher. My plan to replace my dead dishwasher is to try the 4th of July sales - Friend L is going to join me at the store to see if the model I want (Bosch) actually fits in the space I've got (and if it goes on sale - it did not for Memorial Day, that I saw, but maybe I don't need the more expensive/top-of-the-line model? It's just that it has something that will allegedly turn the machine off if it senses a leak, which seems like a good thing to have, especially when you live in an apartment above other people and are responsible if any leakage causes damages below you). Anyway, July is a three-paycheck month, which gives me some leeway for paying most of it off ASAP and not increasing my credit card debt any more than I have to.

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Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Mets vs Rockies on tv

isis

Paul Krugman talks with Ada Palmer about her new (nonfiction) book Inventing the Renaissance. I came at this from the Krugman side (he's a Nobel-winning economist who used to write for the NYT, and I subscribe to his substack) but I figured some of you would be interested from the Palmer side (I never got into Terra Ignota, though). I found it really interesting! I read the transcript, but there's a link to the video conversation as well.

Speaking of Nobelists, a v. v. srs study found that countries with greater per capita chocolate consumption produce more Nobel laureates - so eating chocolate makes you smarter, right? :-)

selenak

Which I would have watched on the big screen if I could have, but a brief showing time and my tight schedule did not allow it. Anyway: this is the movie in which Natalie Portman plays a (tv) actress, Elizabeth, who wants to play Gracie (Julianne Moore) in a movie based on events taking place about two decades plus earlier than the film's setting, which is 2015. (Though the film itself premiered in 2023.) Said events consisted of Gracie, at age 36, having had a "relationship" with a thirteen years old boy, Joe ,whom she after some years in prison for statuary rape married; he's currently 36 (as is Elizabeth), the same age she was back then, and played by Charles Melton, who I osmosed before this movie was mostly famous for playing a jock type in Riverdale but who is absolutely stunning in this film (and should at least have gotten an Oscar nomination), which given he's working with Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman at their best, is truly saying something. There are also kids (the one Gracie was pregnant with when she got caught is now in college, and thn there are twins about to graduate), as well as Gracie's offspring from her earlier marriage, with her son Georgie being the same age as Joe. The movie is directed by Todd Haynes, and dives right into how incredibly messed up a story this is.

Now, if you start the film knot knowing what it's about, then the first few minutes might let you assume it's a black comedy about suburbia; Gracie, Joe and their children live in the proverbial idyllic white fenced area somewhere in South Carolina, with Gracie (who runs a small scale bakery) coming across as somewhat high strung but popular among her neighbours - and then Elizabeth arrives, only to find an anonymous package at the couple's front door which contains feces. There are some comedy beats throughout the remaining movie, but actually I would classify it as emotional horror. Gracie is still absolutely incapable of admitting she ever did anything wrong, and we get an early taste of her ability to manipulate and achieve emotional control when she comments on her daughter's choice of prom dress: "You're so brave to show your arms! I wouldn't have dared", with the result that of course the poor girl doesn't buy that dress but the one Gracie likes. Elizabeth isn't the film's heroine, either, though in the first half her investigation provides the audience bit by bit with the backstory from various povs via the characters Elizabeth talks to; the movie goes full throttle about what a disturbing and ruthlessly exploitative process an actor working on a role can be if that role isn't a fictional character but a real person. (BTW, of course Portman and Moore don't look much alike, but that only helps enhancing the sense of disquiet as Elizabeth adopts more and more of Gracie's mannerisms, with the scene where Gracie gives Elizabeth a makeover with her own makeup and lipstick being a showcase in point.)

Meanwhile, Joe starts out on a quiet background note when compared to the two women, and then the story shows more and more how messed up not just the start of his relationship with Gracie was but how messed up their present day relationship still is. More than one review described Joe as a thirteen years old still locked in the body of an adult man, and before watching the film I assumed this meant Joe would be characterized as a manchild, but no, that's not what was meant at all. If anything, he's the most reasonably and responsibly acting adult in this film. But emotionally, it becomes clear he's never had the chance to process what happened, not least because his entire life is still built around keeping Gracie happy. He became a father years and years before growing up, and the scene where due to his teenage son for the first time sharing pot with him his quiet and calm facade finally cracks and some of that repressed emotion breaks through is incredibly good and heartbreaking.

Incidentally: making a movie which deals with an adult grooming a kid without getting voyeuristic with a young actor sounds near impossible - but May-December by showing us the aftermath and the long term effect everything had on Joe decades later proves it can be done. At the same time, we do get a visual reminder of just how young he was when Elizabeth gets sent video clips of teenagers auditioning to play Joe. (The audition clips don't show more than them introducing themselves with their name and age.) Elizabeth looks appalled, and the audience might think it's because it hits her how young thirteen really is.... and then a few scenes later, she's on the phone with her producer and tells him these guys are just wrong because they don't look sexy enough. Which tells you something about Elizabeth.

Despite how good this film is - with script, acting and cinematography all outstanding - , I'm not surprised it wasn't a box office success (while getting deservedly criticial praise.) It's hardly a subject lending itself to relaxation, and despite its three leads all being very attractive people, any sexual activity is basically the opposite of fanservice - like I said, it's an emotional horror show. Not something I'll rewatch any time soon, though I am glad I watched it once, and am full of admiration for what it achieves.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Bamberg

sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

skygiants

A while back,

lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that

lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

musesfool

The Mets lost a game yesterday they should have won, but I guess it doesn't matter that much because they took the season series from the Dodgers, which means if they are both divisional winners and meet in the NLCS in October, the Mets will have home field advantage. I mean, it would have been nice for them to win on a day when both Atlanta and Philly lost, but I guess you can't have everything.

Anyway, staying up for the previous games in the series (they were out in LA) caught up with me and I couldn't keep my eyes open last night, so I ended up going right to bed at 8:30. It wasn't even fully dark yet! But I slept through till 4:15, got up to use the bathroom, and then slept through again till my alarm went off at 8:15, so I guess I really needed it. I had a lot of dreams, but the one that stuck with me was something where I was already in the hospital visiting someone, and the doctor was like, "we need to talk about your appendix, it needs to come out!" And I was like, "that's news to me since I haven't had an appendix since 1976!" (truth!) And she was like, "what?" and I was like, "what?" and then the dream moved on - I don't remember anything else.

There's really not a whole lot else going on. Work is busy - our CFO keeps trying to steal me away from my boss, but like, there's nothing in Finance for me to do? My main job is board support, and that belongs either in legal or the CEO's office, so...*hands* I guess if something ever happened to my position I might consider trying to transfer, but I just don't see how that would work. No one is indispensable, but no one else in this organization does what I do (and frankly, no one else wants to). If a new CEO comes in and has different ideas, that could be a problem, but I'm trying not to think about that too much. There are closer threats to my job right now. *gestures at everything*

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Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Dreams - Fleetwood Mac

cahn

I know I owe a bunch of comments/replies, sorry, I will get to them; I have spent all my time this week (including time I should have been working... took a nontrivial amount of vacation time this week) on the following:

- looking around at schools for A in case his school gets utterly consumed by the drama (yep, third teacher did leave, now we are screwed unless the Head can find someone really quickly, which to be fair he is working SUPER hard at), unfortunately all my friends who have kids at the local public school were like "if it were ten years ago we'd recommend it, but now we are telling you not to go there"

- talking (and TALKING) to people who are affected by the drama, or who are not directly affected but still angry about the drama, or who are in some cases causing the drama. There is some mean girl stuff going on and it is like, uh, we are all in our 40's and 50's, this is STUPID?? I have been on the phone A LOT this week, to the extent that E has to write a poem for Spanish about a member of her family and told me she was thinking about writing about her mom and how she was on the phone all the time.

- helping E with her final papers/projects in English and Media Arts; for the latter she sometimes needs someone to say things like "if you are making a commercial you probably need a script for it" and for the former she needs someone to be more like, "so... your thesis is made up of two sentences that seem unrelated, and also the way you're structuring this with all your lemma examples and then all your other lemma examples does not really flow very well, and also you begin several sentences in a row with 'This shows'" (some of these are the limits of approaching a paper like a proof, I guess)

Her teacher lets them rewrite after grading multiple times but does not give them any comments on their draft except for the ungraded rough draft, which means that E is on Rewrite #3 and counting, we have worked on drafts every night this week except last night, as her teacher has not graded #3 yet, which I am hoping is a good sign but might just mean that her teacher is tired of her turning in rewrites

(I do like that her teacher is a bit harsh on grading but lets them rewrite -- Rewrite #3 is quite a bit better than her original graded paper, and I think she's learned a LOT about writing a literary analysis paper, admittedly quite a bit more than I knew at her age. But more feedback would have been really nice, and then maybe she could have done fewer rewrites.)

She also has another final project in English with involves writing and illustrating a kid's story about racism, only using animals or objects or shapes instead of people. Of course when "shapes" were mentioned E jumped at that option. Her story is really sweet and involves tessellations of triangles, squares, and hexagons, but she is definitely a "tell not show" kid and also is having trouble with the part of the assignment that directs them to use descriptive language, which just goes to show you that she is legitimately D's and my kid.

In conclusion: ugh, drama. The only good things about all the drama:

- I may actually finish the crochet blanket for E that I've been working on for uh two years but have been making lots of progress on during all these phone calls? (Also getting lots of time to work on it during tutoring E, but at least that has other good things about it besides the blanket.)

- man I appreciate the other non-dramatic parts of my life a LOT more now! Including DW and all of my non-dramatic friends (the vast majority of them!) but I've also been thinking a lot of my church which is my other big social structure. There was one day where I just looked at my phone texts I'd gotten that day and half of them were school-related and were all drama, and the other half were from my church and things like "Hey, can you play piano for us?" and "I haven't forgotten about the D&D group we were talking about with E!" <-- dude and wife had a BABY last week -- and my favorite, this sweet older lady that we are friends with texting me that she went to her eye appointment and they said everything was great, and she was just happy about that. That totally brightened my day <3 And this morning they had the "morning seminary" party (these kids go to 7am scripture study five days a week -- E does it 3 days a week) and these people just give SO much <3

(edited bc cannot do math)

osprey_archer

I’ve never owned my own TV before, but one of my friends had an extra which became mine when I moved into the Hummingbird Cottage. A Target gift card had just come into my possession as a housewarming gift, so I traipsed off to Target for a DVD player.

“I didn’t know we sold those anymore,” the bemused clerk informed me. (Target does, however, have a large record selection. Also WiFi enabled record players. What a time to be alive.)

Undeterred, I made my purchase, and drove home happily dreaming of all the new movies and shows I would watch.

I did in fact manage to watch a couple of new movies: Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle, a wordless movie about a man marooned on an island who ends up marrying a turtle who turns into a woman (as turtles are wont to do), and Werner Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which is a fascinating documentary about trappers in the taiga, although it does keep saying things like “These trappers are almost untouched by modern civilization” as the trappers zoom off in their snow mobiles. I mean. Maybe a little touched by modern civilization?

However, what I’ve mostly been doing is rewatching old favorites. I rewatched the Romola Garai Emma and the pre-Raphaelite miniseries Desperate Romantics (both of which I own), and contemplated borrowing the 2006 Jane Eyre and 2008 Sense and Sensibility miniseries from the library before deciding that no, it was better to wait till I could find them used somewhere, and therefore enjoy the thrill of the hunt.

(I have not yet found either of those miniseries, but on my last visit to Half Price Books I DID find a copy of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries for a mere $10!!! which was instantly stolen by a friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Which is fair enough I guess.)

I did get the first two seasons of The Vicar of Dibley from the library, and have now started in on their Poirot collection, and was disconcerted to discover that with Poirot in particular I have barely any memory of the show. Things like the bit where Miss Lemon says “Poirot looked middle-aged even as a baby,” yes. The solutions to the mysteries? No. Gone. Might as well have never watched the show. Which is convenient for a rewatch, admittedly.

As much as I’m enjoying my rewatches, however (season one of Downton Abbey next?), I would like to stir a few new-to-me things into the mix as well.

1. I’ve started the 1981 sitcom A Fine Romance, because (a) it stars Judi Dench, and (b) the episodes are half an hour long. (I’m a sucker for shows with half hour episodes.) It’s cute, but I’m not totally sold yet. Will give it a few more episodes and see how I feel.

2. On the topic of half hour shows (actually 22-minute shows), I’ve heard Abbott Elementary is fantastic. Yes? No? Maybe so?

3. Given my love of Poirot, I was looking thoughtfully at the Miss Marple adaptations. But alas they’re all two hours long, and I turn into a pumpkin at about 60 minutes.

4. Has anyone seen Flambards? Would you recommend it? I’m considering it because it’s on the shelf at the library and I have a vague memory of someone, somewhere, gushing about it, except maybe they were gushing about the book that it’s based on and not the show.

5. I attempted to watch a Vanity Fair miniseries, by which I mean that I got a copy out of the library and then never even put it in the DVD player because the thought of watching Becky Sharp be mean to people while smiling sweetly was too stressful. Strongly suspect I would feel the same way about the classic 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, which is unfortunate as it would be the perfect capper for my George Smiley readings.

6. However, as a general rule, I do enjoy book to miniseries adaptations, especially if they’re period pieces and the episodes are less than an hour long. So please let me know if you have recs!

sholio

The recent "only one bed" meme (which I still haven't finished, as per usual) led to only-one-bed thoughts and this missing scene for B5 5x16.

One Safe Harbor (also on Ao3 - G'Kar/Londo, 2300 words, explicit)
Missing scene on the flight from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime in 5x16. Two people in a very small sleeping space. Also, some feelings are had.

( One Safe Harbor - 2300 wds )

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

sholio

I watched the first 15 minutes of "In the Beginning" back in May, and finally watched the rest last night. I enjoyed it, despite not being that interested in the 10-years-earlier part of the timeline (or the Minbari, for the most part). Annoyingly, the audio/video was a little out of sync for most of it, and I'm not sure why.

( Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV movie )

rachelmanija

This sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, a young adult post-apocalypse novel with a lovely slow-burn gay romance, fell victim to a trope I basically never like: the sequel to a romance that starts out by breaking up the main couple or pitting them against each other. It may be realistic but I hate it. If the main thing I liked about the first book was the main couple's dynamic - and if I'm reading the sequel, that's definitely the case - then I'm never going to like a sequel where their dynamic is missing or turns negative. I'm not saying they can't have conflict, but they shouldn't have so much conflict that there's nothing left of the relationship I loved in the first place.

This book starts out with Jamison and Andrew semi-broken up and not speaking to each other or walking on eggshells around each other, because Andrew wants to stay in the nice post-apocalyptic community they found and Jamison wants to return to their cabin and live alone there with Andrew. Every character around them remarks on this and how they need to just talk to each other. Eventually they talk to each other, but it resolves nothing and they go on being weird about each other and mourning the loss of their old relationship. ME TOO.

Then half the community's children die in a hurricane, and it's STILL all about them awkwardly not talking to each other and being depressed. I checked Goodreads, saw that they don't make up till the end, and gave up.

The first book is still great! It didn't need a sequel, though I would have enjoyed their further adventures if it had continued the relationship I loved in the first book. I did not sign up for random dead kids and interminable random sulking.

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Alex

June 2022

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Page Summary

sovay - All that skin against the glass
sholio - Hornet Flight - Ken Follett
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
sovay - I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet
osprey_archer - Book Review: Midwinter Nightingale
asakiyume - the rambling rose and all her beguiling promises
dhampyresa - "We don't trade lives" sure, man
musesfool - that double just loosened him up last night
isis - interesting links to fascinate people
selenak - May-December (Film Review)
sovay - It's morphogenesis
sovay - Finally, time to write the book on you
skygiants - (no subject)
musesfool - it's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
cahn - (no subject)
osprey_archer - Adventures in DVDs
sholio - Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor
sovay - On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running
sholio - Babylon 5: In the Beginning (the rest of it)
rachelmanija - The Only Light Left Burning, by Erik J. Brown: DNF

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Style: Dreamer for Dusty Foot by timeasmymeasure

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Page generated Jun. 9th, 2025 02:56 pm

forever we try

Reading

All that skin against the glass

Hornet Flight - Ken Follett

Recent reading

I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet

Book Review: Midwinter Nightingale

the rambling rose and all her beguiling promises

"We don't trade lives" sure, man

that double just loosened him up last night

interesting links to fascinate people

May-December (Film Review)

It's morphogenesis

Finally, time to write the book on you

(no subject)

it's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams

(no subject)

Adventures in DVDs

Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Babylon 5: In the Beginning (the rest of it)

The Only Light Left Burning, by Erik J. Brown: DNF

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June 2022

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