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My eyes are bothering me lately; anything close-focus is hard. Really challenging as most of my hobbies involve close focus. I have a lot of pain in my mouth and face so concentrating is also difficult.
TV seems to be the way to go but I feel like I've run out of shows.
Enjoying: Murderbot. Also loved The Pitt, and the Old Guard 2. Task Master and DropOut (Game changer, etc), continue to delight.
Other things I've watched:
Mr Robot. Gave up after one season. It's grim and humorless. I liked some of the actors a lot but the aesthetic was so gray on gray, and a high preference for very thin bodies and baggy eyes, like heroin-addict chic. For a thriller it's weirdly slow.
The storied life of AJ Fikry: A cromulent romance / drama on Netflix. Cute if not particularly memorable. It's about people who love reading and live on an island only accessible by ferry. Has multiple characters of color.
I watched 2 episodes of "Nobody Wants This", a rom-com with Kristen Bell. Her character falls in love with a rabbi. The characters felt really thinly drawn and so I did not care about them. There was just no there there, as they say.
The Last Breath: a drama about a survival story involving deep-sea construction workers (based on a true story). I liked this pretty well but think it would have worked better with some documentary-style explanations of what was happening.
Clean Slate: on Amazon Prime, a sitcom about a trans woman reconnecting with her father. I dropped this because I could not see what was happening! There seemed to be a gray film over everything! I might try it again later as it had some good humor and characters.
I tried season three of the Bear but it was unpleasant.
I played Dragon Age: Inquisition through twice, which was very restful for my brain actually. I think it would be a good idea to invest further in video games, which help me pass the time when I'm ill. I don't know much about gaming systems. I'd love to play Dragon Age Veilguard and some other newer games but how to decide on what kind of system to get? They are expensive. I got the Xbox 360 used and have absolutely loved having it.
What are you enjoying watching or playing? | |
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I'm very much in winter mode here as although some days are sunny, it's cold, and a lot of days are very wet. So not going outside much and not doing gardening, which I don't feel great about. I seem a bit beset by inertia in terms of things physical, possibly a mid-winter slump, but I'm doing indoors things just fine - well, the things I like doing, anyway. Not cleaning or organising! I do tidy up once a week before Fionna comes to vacuum, and occasionally the dishes get washed, but that's about it. I've started another longer podfic - this one for the due South Big Bang. Am also continuing to add lots of new podfics to the Audiofic Archive (we got inundated by >600 short ones from a recent Voiceteam challenge). And I finished a personal project with the Audiofic Archive of adding streaming links to all the SGA podfics there so they can be enjoyed easily with no need to download zip files. That's 138 pages of SGA podfics! - and increasing each week, as we make more. Next fandom to complete is due South. In the process I stumbled on Lim's old Fanvid page on Wayback, and the vid downloads still worked. Lim made avant garde vids with lots of altered graphics. Some are on AO3 but a lot of the SGA ones aren't. The Wayback page is here (with additional info and credits), and I downloaded the SGA ones and converted them to mp4 format here. CW for flashing, fast cuts, loud music in some of them. One, Mission Report, ( lyrics) is a multimedia podvid where Lim created the lyrics, music, and vid, and sang it for the SGA flashfic comm. In "first world problem" news, a grocery mix-up. My online delivery packer needs help with alliums! Ordered a bunch of spring (green) onions: 
And got a giant leek. Size matters! (in terms of making salads, anyway)
 Finally, I saw this amazing poem on tumblr, apparently written by nine-for-a-kiss as a teenager. It's very Dark-is-Rising-ish. | |
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My health has made some minor improvements, so I've seen a bit more productivity than I have been seeing. The problem is that this then encourages me to spread myself thinner. Which is not great. Goal UpdatesI haven't made more progress on my fic because I've been working on a oneshot to take a break. I've caught up with the temperature blanket so I'm not as far behind. I've written one poem that I wanted to write (of four for the goal) and been chipping away at the outline I wanted to do. I've been working on some art canvases that may make up the 'projects I'm proud of' goal.
June Stats - 5 books read
- I finished 2 TV shows (loved Dept Q!) and 6 movies
- For writing, I'm nearing the end of my take-a-break oneshot.
- I spent a total of 12 hours 38 minutes drafting 14,659 words (~20 wpm)! That's almost double the time and triple the words from last month!
- I completed no crafts but put a lot into my temp blanket
- I spent 3h 40m on my 2025 crochet temperature blanket
- I made 3 baked goods (all of which were. okay at best)
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I need to write down my ipod playlists somewhere and this journal is likely to outlive whatever notebook I write them in. The ipod was last attached to a computer and new music put on in 2014, so it's a little bit of a time capsule. ( bucky and steve )( misc )( unpublished fanmixes )saving here while I go eat. | |
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Last Tuesday, we headed back up to the plains again. There was a pretty good thunderstorm chance, so we wanted to see if we could get a good view of any of them. Eh... mixed results. We did get to see a little bit of nice lightning, but the storms lost most of their oomph by the time they reached us up there. Except for the rain. There was a LOT of water in those clouds! Somehow we managed not to get any hail, which was surprising. The storm eventually reintensified a bit farther north, and while we followed it for a while (through the absolutely wild quantities of rain), we eventually gave up on it. Partially because we didn't want to go much farther, and partially because the rain was so heavy you couldn't see much else, so even if it had done something cool, it would have been hard to see.  Before following it north, we sat in the rain in a parking lot for a bit. This is a screenshot from a video I took of the rain. I'm not sure this even really shows just how intense it was! Down one of the county roads we were on, we did see a neat old structure. We were able to pull over to grab a couple pictures on the way back, once the rain had stopped.  
A couple pictures of clouds, some of swallow nests:
Stormclouds!
More clouds!
We've taken this exit off the highway before, but there's a really extensive colony of cliff swallows:
I love their nests; they look like little clay pots.
Not the most amazingly successful day, but still nice to get out and do things. The old house? church? other? was neat. | |
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* There is going to be a transmasc event this year in Portland for Pride. It's at a bar, it's called Boyhole and the event logo is about what you'd expect from the name.
a spread vagina.
* I am about 1/2 way through converting my D&D characters to the new ruleset. Eh, probably closer to a third of the way done as Tristan wont take as long to redo. Actually, wait, no, I have to make myself new rules references sheets because familiar terms like 'favored enemy' and 'stonecunning' now mean totally different things. I will be done someday. | |
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I could probably make this a faster post by just copying and pasting last month's, ha.
It's now been half of a year of "not really writing much." It definitely feels really discouraging at this point, and frustrating, because just a few years ago I managed to write quite a lot... and just haven't been able to recapture either the interest/inspiration or the success at just pushing through and getting words on page.
June was a rough month, emotionally, and that didn't lend itself to a lot of desire to write.
My goals for June were:
- finish one more chapter of the iddy WIP (in order to decide whether I wanted to continue with it, or stick it on the back burner)
- outline the second iddy story, which had been the one I was most often thinking about and feeling inspired by
- continue the snowflake outline for the "Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity" fic
- think about the silly holiday AU fic, in the hopes of being able to actually have it completed by the holidays if I were to get going on it now
How did that go?
- I did not finish another chapter of the WIP, but I did get a couple thousand words written on it.
- I didn't outline the other story... and it's stopped being the thing my thoughts keep drifting to, so I'm afraid I lost my shot and harnessing the wave of inspiration. (Nothing has replaced it in my thoughts. Even when I'm trying, I can't really seem to focus on anything.)
- I did not work on the outline for the WFM fic.
- I didn't think about the silly holiday fic even once.
For the most part, I think I'll just shuffle most of the same goals forward into July.
Goals for July:
- Finish up the rest of this chapter of the iddy WIP. I want to reach the end of the chapter just to have a reasonable break point, but I think I will shelve the idea for a while after that. I haven't completely lost interest, but feel like I'm slogging through mud every time I try to work on it.
- I might still try to outline the other story, if only because I don't want to forget the ideas that I did have for it. (More than I possibly already have!) Unfortunately, it's no longer the "yay" feeling of excitement for the project, so it might also be immediately shelved.
- I do want to at least try to get a bit more of the WFM outline done. I have one more character to do "part 3" for, and it's stupid that I have spent months being stalled out on it.
- Holiday fic is getting punted forward... I don't think I could capture the lighthearted tone I want to for it right now.
Goals for August and beyond:
- Seriously, just find SOMETHING that I care about writing.
- Make some progress on the WFM outline.
- ???
Rereading this, it feels a lot more pessimistic than I was intending for it to be! I tend to try to keep stuff pretty positive, even when I'm not succeeding at getting the things I hoped for done. Unfortunately, part of the issue is just that I don't even especially want to be doing any of these things right now.
I'm used to feeling like I have things I want to be doing, but am failing to find the time and/or energy to pursue them. This time, I feel like I'm lacking the time, energy, and inspiration. (I'm coming up on a string of days off, and while we have plans for a lot of that time, to be honest, I don't even have the hypothetical desire to like, set a day of the time aside to write.)
So... is there a reason for me to push forward on any of this at all right now? Would it be better to just kind of let it all lay fallow for a bit? Maybe just focusing on media intake for a while would be a good idea. More reading, maybe even like... playing a video game for a while, which is something I haven't done at all this year, I don't think (minus the FFXIV playthrough with Taylor.) To be fair, I haven't been doing much writing at all, so it's not like this will free up vast quantities of time to put toward other things, but maybe if I'm not feeling bad about failing to write, I'll feel better about doing other things?
In light of that... Maybe I will still try to get the current WIP chapter done, just so I can put it away at a decent stopping point, and maybe finish out the third part of the snowflake outline, because that's really such a tiny commitment. After that I think I'll pause things until I feel a little more interested in something. (Or can at least see if a full, on-purpose break brings back that interest in any way!) | |
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June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.
It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too. | |
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Denver Pride was this weekend, so went with a sticker from the museum that I got at a previous pride, since it has the skyline and all.
This was a good week. I'm happy with what I got done, including both reading and writing, as well as some other organizational stuff. We did things on my days off, and ending with an extra day off (even if it was the equivalent of taking a Thursday off for me, ha) to go to Pride was nice. I still have things that I need to catch up on, so will hopefully manage that next week, along with keeping on with the reading and writing. Looking forward to an upcoming string of days off.
Goals for the week:
- I sort of caught up on DW, but not completely
- I did finish reading Camp Damascus
- I read Lost in the Moment and Found
- We went to Pride on Saturday
- We got some outside time
- I did not update my reading page
- I did not work on the snowflake outline
- While I did not finish a chapter of the old WIP, I did get quite a bit done on it
- I did set up my LibraryThing account (beyond just creating it)
- I started reading Dead Silence
Tracked habits:
- Work - 4/7, having taken Saturday off
- Household Maintenance - 3/7
- Physical Activity - 4/7
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 2/7 - both over 1000 words
- Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
- Meta Work - 6/7
- Personal Writing - 4/7
- Other Creative Things - 2/7
- Reading - 7/7 - I finished Camp Damascus, read Lost in the Moment and Found, started Dead Silence, read some Duma Key with Alex.
- Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday I had some youtube in the background at work, storm chasing later; Monday had something in the background; Tuesday and Wednesday listened to Re: Dracula and music; Thursday had some exploration and paranormal videos in the background and listened to music; Friday had storm chasing in the background; Saturday more storm chasing, including a very dramatic tornado.
- Video Games - 0/7
- Social Interaction - 7/7
Total words written: 2073 on WIP
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From this U.S. fangirl for Canada on today's Canada Day and every day: declaring my love and respect for the Great Sovereign Land of Canada. Ten Inspiring Quotations About Canada.(And furthermore: Fox Delta Tango!) | |
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I'm so excited about this exchange! I adore EO and am looking forward to getting to write them for someone. I hope you have a blast writing for me! ( Preferences )I haven't requested A/B/O, but you're OK to mix that in with whatever other scenario as long as Elliot's an alpha, Liv's an omega, and Kathy's a beta. (It's pretty obvious that Instinct imprinted on me, lol, isn't it?) I also didn't request Sharing a Bed but I'm always good with that trope being thrown into any fic. Below are further thoughts, under various headings. ( Some thoughts )And now for the requested tropes, many of which can be combined: ( Tropes! )Happy writing! | |
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Oof. Only three books this month, which feels rough. This was a rough month as a whole, and that definitely did have an impact on my reading and just how much I wanted to do anything in general. Maeve Fly by CJ Leede Horror (subgenres: erotic(?), psychopath/serial killer/torture/slasher-y) (background f/m) - ebook novel 2.5/5 As a teenager, Maeve ran away to Hollywood, seeking out a grandmother she'd never met. In her grandmother—retired Hollywood royalty of the silver screen—Maeve finds an unexpected kindred spirit. Her grandmother recognizes that Maeve is, like her, a predator among ordinary humanity, though she warns her that she must keep that predatory instinct firmly leashed, lest she be found out. Maeve loves Hollywood and LA as a whole, adoring the artifice and artificiality, the desperation of so many of its inhabitants. She loves very few other things: her job as the "Nordic Princess" in a carefully-unnamed destination theme park, her grandmother, her coworker and friend Kate, the weird erotic and misanthropic literature that she tries to find reflections of herself in, Halloween. Maeve's carefully curated and controlled life begins to fall apart, with her grandmother falling into a coma she'll never wake from, and Kate beginning to leave her behind as her career as an actress takes off. Kate's brother, hockey player Gideon, moves to town and seems to believe that he understands Maeve on some deeper level... though she's certain that with the exception of her grandmother, there is no one out there who could.
My thoughts, some spoilers, and pretty significant content warnings:
I'm going to be clear that my rating is largely a mismatch of taste. I like a lot of horror genres, but torture porn is one of the few that I just don't care for. No shade, and if you are a fan of it, then this book is probably going to appeal a lot more. If that's your jam, I recommend this one! Because yeah, content warning for some eventually very graphic descriptions of torturing people, sometimes to death. Much of the torture also has a sexual element to it. The book itself I think was well written, and enjoyable from the "be in the head of a terrible person" perspective, it just turned out to be very much not for me.
(I saw some other discussion of this book call it "part slasher-romance" but I mostly disagree; slasher vs. torture porn are, to me, pretty distinct from each other, and this falls more firmly in the latter category, even if both are under the "serial killer/psychopathic killer" umbrella. If you specifically like slasher-romance, this might scratch that itch, but I wouldn't say it is that. Maeve's relationship with Gideon is highly relevant to the story, but is also very much a subplot.)
Maeve is clearly pretty psychopathic from the start, and this is very much a negative character arc, so she very deliberately gets worse. I don't dislike that, and it's the obvious throughline for a theme of the book (and one that Maeve expresses for herself): that women aren't allowed to be monsters the same way men are in fiction. For female characters there's often a question of what happened to make them "like that," or to have pushed them to that point, where male characters can just be monsters. This isn't fourth-wall breaking, but I feel like just sort of cozies up to that fourth wall, when Maeve deliberately styles herself after and takes inspiration from monsters in fiction, (ultimately channeling American Psycho.) She is the example of that thing she wishes she could find: a female character (written by a female author) who is monstrous not because of some secret trauma or tragedy, but because she just is, and because she actively chooses to embrace it.
I wouldn't say that I ever fully liked Maeve, but I don't think she's intended to be liked. She certainly wouldn't want to be! She was at least interesting, even if it was often in a "ah, so you're just horrible!" way. Other times she was... maybe a bit tedious, if only because she was a little too much like some "yeah, I'm into the really dark stuff, no one else gets it" sort-of "guy in your MFA" subtypes that I've met, haha. Of course, Maeve makes sure to earn her "no, I'm genuinely a monster" cred in a way I hope none of those dudes I've spoken to did, lol.
There are times where she is still sympathetic in her loneliness or her strange brand of protectiveness over the few people she cares for. There are other times where the book goes out of its way to make sure she isn't too sympathetic. (Like... one of her hobbies is targeting people online in order to ruin their lives, often by outing them as having abhorrent views. But even as she's revealing a woman's desire to join the KKK to keep non-whites out of her neighborhood, Maeve remarks that she really doesn't care that the woman is racist; she wants to ruin her because she's self-righteous in a way that Maeve hates. It is made clear this is not a vigilante "channeling my dark impulses to do harm to bad people" situation or anything.)
The book goes to excellent and often darkly funny lengths to never mention anything too directly Disney-related, while still making it completely and inescapably clear that Maeve is an Elsa face-character.
I liked the twist at the end, and the way Maeve sets herself up for it, but won't spoil it.
Perfectly decent book, but wasn't my thing. by Chuck Tingle Horror (subgenres: queer, religious/cult/demonic) (background f/f) - physical novel 3.5/5 Rose is a perfectly happy and ordinary member of the Christian cult church Kingdom of the Pine, a denomination that all but owns the town of Neverton, Montana. The church's main claim to fame is Camp Damascus, a gay conversion camp that boasts a 100% success rate. Rose is devout, happy, and content living with her loving parents. Then strange things begin to happen: she sees a strange humanoid figure lurking in the shadows, she vomits up masses of flies, and she experiences glimpses of memories that could never have happened. Her parents and her church-approved therapist seem only mildly concerned, implying that any of these circumstances may have been brought on by her own failings of faith. As the mystery figure haunting her escalates to violence against her and others around her, Rose begins to identify gaps in her own memories, and becomes increasingly certain that there is something deeply sinister going on.
My thoughts, mild spoilers:
This one is right between a 3.5 and a 4 for me. I did enjoy it, but I didn't love it the way I'd hoped to. I went with the 3.5 because I felt like it had a stronger start than finish.
I did really like the early parts, where the hints of weirdness were starting. I wouldn't say that the end was disappointing per se, and parts of it certainly delivered well on the premise, but I just couldn't quite connect with all of it. There were a few aspects of the ending that I didn't feel fully explained what they were meant to. (Okay, we have this [spoiler] substance to induce memory loss... but that memory loss in practice seems more targeted than seems plausible. Okay, [spoiler] explains why the whole 'puking flies' thing happened, but also... does it explain that, really? There's enough extra-dimensional weirdness to handwave the bits that still feel off, but I don't want to handwave!) This wasn't like... Lost levels of "excellent creepy setup, zero payoff" or anything, but the setup felt stronger than the explanation.
I enjoyed Rose's perspective, and how very attached to her devout upbringing she was at the start - lots of Bible verses and instinctive "what would the church want me to do?" thoughts, which was certainly different than I'm used to reading. Watching doubt creep in (consistent with the ways in which she was already a very curious and analytical person) was a good arc, as is later realizing just why she may have had those "instinctive" thoughts in the first place.
But as the book went on, it felt like the perspective on religion was a little too... tepid? I'm not sure why exactly it felt that way, because it's not like I disagree with any of it, really. But her friend Saul comes down on the side of wanting to maintain his Christian faith, just in a way that feels more affirming and loving. Willow is an unspecified type of witch. Rose initially takes a pretty staunchly atheistic position, but almost immediately decides that that would be swinging too far the opposite direction from the coercive religion she's disconnecting from, and that she should settle somewhere in the middle, that she still "should" have some amount of faith. On the one hand, I get it: the book isn't trying to say that all Christianity or all religion is a bad thing! It's specifically about the damaging, abusive attitudes of a fundamentalist and extreme version, so it's good to make it textually clear that there are alternatives even within religion. But... on the other, it just ended up feeling meh.
I did enjoy the specifics of how the cult was operating, and what decisions they'd justified for themselves.
I pictured Pachid, Rose's demon, as the Pale Lady from "The Dream" from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark the whole time (except wearing a polo shirt), which is really neither here nor there, but it was a strong image.
And I loved the creepiness of the demons wearing polo shirts with nametags. The whole "this demonic horror is simply an employee" vibes were great.
There were a couple writing quirks that weren't my favorite. It felt like an attempt to avoid overuse of pronouns, but Rose frequently referred to her parents in her thoughts by their first names (which felt weird, and didn't seem to be a narrative choice to show distance or anything, as she did so even when she felt very close to her parents), and she repeatedly referred to Saul as "my friend" in her narration in a way that felt weird, too. These may just be character quirks, or deliberate emphasis on what these characters are to her, but it felt unnatural to me.
I feel like the ideal medium for this story would have been like... a SyFy original movie, but it would have been a really good one. by Seanan McGuire Book 8 of Wayward ChildrenFantasy - physical novella 5/5 The first and most important thing that Antsy loses as a child is her father. After, her mother remarries, to a man Antsy cannot force herself to like. When he proves that her mistrust was extremely justified, she runs away, eventually arriving at a mysterious junk shop. There she meets an older woman named Vineta, and a talking magpie named Hudson. They explain that the store is a nexus world, a place connected to all manner of other worlds by way of the magical Doors, which Antsy is able to easily open to explore. Theirs is a kingdom of lost things, providing a safe place for them until they can be found again. Antsy settles in to work in this new place... but something seems wrong about the time that passes, as if there's a secret that Antsy has been kept from knowing. My brief thoughts, minor content warning:
This book does come with a content warning up front, because Antsy, who is a child, is repeatedly targeted and gaslit by an adult would-be abuser, who ultimately does threaten her with non-graphic, but clearly implied future sexual abuse. None of this comes to pass, because she escapes before it can.
I really enjoyed this one. It was an extremely quick read. (These are all fairly short novellas, but this one seemed to go particularly fast.)
While it's been hinted at previously, it's interesting to see more information about the Doors between worlds, and the fact that they have some form of will and sentience, and it's ambiguous what their motives and purpose may be.
This world itself is a fun one, and I particularly love it being the world from which all magpies originate.
Fun cameo from Jack and Jill, when Antsy ends up briefly in The Moors, though she is directed to retreat before they can interact with her.
Antsy's story is another tragedy, made worse because so little of what happens to her is her fault. I hope that we get to stick with her as a character long enough for things to work out for her (though that's far from a guarantee, I know!)I am currently in the middle of four books: - Dead Silence (my current main read) - Buchanan House (still my side read) - Duma Key (with Alex) - Installment Immortality (with Taylor)
I also finally got a LibraryThing account set up! I looked at it based on ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) olivermoss's recommendation, as I was looking for something to keep track of books read and such, but really didn't want to use Goodreads. (In part because they're Amazon-owned, but also people can also be real weird about stuff on there at times. People can and will be weird anywhere, but Goodreads drama can be a lot, lol.) Storygraph is a popular alternative, and I know I did set up a login on there, but it didn't seem to mesh well with how I actually wanted to use it. LibraryThing definitely works for what I want to use it for! It's been easy to find and get books added, easy to rate them, easy to edit any other information about them, easy to tag them in whatever way makes sense for me... so it's currently working really well for me. The UI looks very simple in a lot of ways, but is very robust. It's intended to be usable as a catalog for libraries as well as individuals. I really like how easily customizable it is. I can easily edit the publication date if the one it pulled isn't the correct one for the edition I have (a problem I think caused by how Amazon does their listings, where hardcover/paperback/ebook/audiobook are all part of the same listing, despite having different pub dates, and Amazon is one of the easiest places to pull book info from.) I can edit the title field to standardize the way it includes series information (since that's not completely standardized in what it defaults to.) If it defaults to a cover I don't like/the wrong edition for a book, I can check the site to find alternate covers that have been uploaded, or could provide my own. (But you also don't HAVE to do any of that.) I also appreciate how easy it is to sort the way it's displayed. I wanted the dates for when I read each book to show up, so I was able to add that as a column to my default view and then sort the whole library based on those dates. There's also a lot of information that isn't relevant to me (the dimensions of the book, some extremely specific cataloging or publishing info, etc.) and it's extremely easy to ignore all of the stuff I don't find important, haha. The only annoyance I've really found is that reordering collections doesn't seem to be working (as it hasn't worked on three different devices/OSs and two different browsers). [When in doubt, check the forum! Other people have had the same issue, but there's a page that serves as a workaround, so I was able to do that.] The "pulling the wrong edition's publication date" or "inconsistent series title/number formatting" are mildly annoying, but so trivially easy to fix that it's a non-issue. I went back as far as 2022 to list the books I've read, up through everything I have in progress. (I don't plan to include anything farther back than that, though I was considering at least adding in the earlier books in various series in... but most series will eventually get reread, so I can probably just wait for that, ha.) I also feel bad not including a lot of favorite books... but again, they're on the TBR list as rereads, so they'll get there eventually. I haven't yet put the rest of my TBR in, and am trying to decide if I want to do that, or if I want to keep it as a record only of the things I have read. I'm torn! Wanting to track the TBR is part of what I wanted a site like this to do, and limiting how many things you could mark as officially "to be read" was part of what I didn't like about some sites. However... I also don't know that I want to completely overwhelm my library with books I haven't yet read and likely won't get to for a few years. I will likely compromise and maybe add in the next five or so books that I plan to read, to keep it a bit more manageable. | |
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* I only have one rainbowy shirt, and it's the D&D logo in rainbow. But, the logo isn't very recognizable even in general gaming spaces, so I need something else. I mean, I have San Junipero shirts and my Pink Opaque pins, but I need something that's not an obscure reference. And of course I've got the classic trans-masc problem of not wanting flair or anything that would read femme. I do have the TPK Brewing Logo in rainbow colors on one of my bags, but I need like... more shirts or like an accessory that I can add to whatever outfit.
Pride collections either sucking or not happening this year is being very inconvenient for me. Ditto art pop ups and markets either not being around or turning out to be furry event that the venue mis-advertised. (the more I think about it, the more that one event just makes me feel fucking depressed)
I was even at the mall yesterday for various reasons and the only place with rainbowy and/or pride stuff was the PopMart store and no, I am not going down that path. | |
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My schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.
Who will I see at Readercon next month?
The Works of P. Djèlí Clark Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest! The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline. Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing [I'm moderating this one] Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall. Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT Meet the Pros(e) party Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.
The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one] Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments. Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies [I'm moderating this one] Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre? The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors? | |
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Yesterday I was able to take a weekend day off of work in order for us to go to Denver Pride. (Wish it could have been the whole weekend, but alas.) It was a nice time! We got a slightly later start than intended, but we made it down there by about 11:00. We took the train, as usual, because no one wants to deal with parking down there. The 16th Street Mall is still torn up in spots, so the mall ride bus does some weird zigzags, and no longer goes all the way to Civic Center Park, but it still gets close. We actually did not see any counter-protestors (often there's at least a small group screaming things at the entry lines. They may have been there earlier, but by the time we were there they were gone if so.) It was a bit less crowded than previous years, both in terms of attendees and in terms of booths. (There were a couple stretches that were just empty, which was weird to see.) A lot fewer big corporate tents in general; still some, but fewer than previous years. More mid-sized corporate presence, "big" but local companies and organizations, rather than national ones. A few exceptions. I know that was a big thing this year, in terms of a lot of companies pulling out from doing Pride sponsorships. I'm not like, corporate pride's number one fan or anything, but it's definitely a bellwether for general social and cultural support, so... Not Great. Also not great because this is the main fundraiser for our biggest LGBTQ+ organization, and having big donors pull out from supporting it is a blow to them and their services. However, Denver Pride had previously gotten some (kind of deserved) criticism of how corporate a lot of it had become a few years back. It may not be the case now, but a couple years ago it certainly was, and there was some reasonable complaint about how so many actually queer-owned and -operated businesses had been priced out of participating. For the last couple years they've had a specific section set up for smaller creators, with a lower booth rental cost. It's kind of just a gay craft fair, ha. (We didn't get to that section last year, so this year we started there.)  I bought an ace pride crochet snail for Alex. It was deemed the emotional support snail.  And we got Bella a bandana.  I spent way too much on cute enamel pins (my weakness), plus stickers, and some other random stuff, like my art friends' tarot deck (which has been sold out every time I finally try to buy it), and a couple rings. I'm happy with the stuff we got, and that a lot of it was from smaller creators. Still spendier than we should have been, but oh well. We did make a whole circuit of the park, but it's quite possible we missed some booths that were there. (It's easy to miss, when there's stuff to both sides, and fairly heavy foot traffic. It was also really hot, and we were wilting.) I know we were dehydrated, because between the two of us we finished off four large bottles of generic-brand gatorade, and neither of us needed to pee, ha. We stayed for several hours, and headed back around 5:00 or so. The train we wanted to get home had been cancelled "due to lack of operator availability", but we only had to wait 20 minutes or so for another. It was a nice day, we had some good conversations, and I'm glad we got to go. <3 | |
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So I read this post from the OTC. I totally understand why OTC needs a non-commercialization policy. On a petty level I've been annoyed at, for instance, someone writing fics in a kink meme and then linking to a site like Ko-fi at the end. And for copyright reasons I get not monetizing works. But part of me feels like their rules are a wee bit draconian. I've been linking to the summaries of books I use as summaries for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png) unconventionalcourtship to prove that they're real books since the goal is to alter a romance novel summary for a fic. I'm not advocating people to actually buy the book. I don't even know these authors. I haven't read their books. 🤐 I guess in the future I may just leave the links to the comm announcement posts and on DW but I'm a bit annoyed I'm being lumped in with people who actually are "please go to my Patreon for more!" when I thought I was doing a good deed. Also: The OTC mentions Twitch but I want to clarify that getting a Twitch account is free. I would assume under their TOS that asking people to get Twitch subscriptions (with or without Amazon Prime) is against their TOS. There is no such thing as "Twitch Prime." And technically I think X actually can't be allowed to since you can subscribe to individual creators on X. IDK, I think this policy needs a little bit of hammering out because to be fair it's thorny to enforce their commercial promotion policy as is. | |
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