Moontime began today. My cramps were affecting me even before my moontime began. I got skin patches that are supposed to be for sleep, because they have magnesium, L-theanine and valerian which also relieve cramps. I tried them and they work! The patches also have melatonin and chamomile and so on for sleep, but wearing one during the day didn't make me sleepy. Taking a walk for an hour helped ease the cramps, too.
My gut is absolutely wrecked though, and I don't know what to do about that. It's utterly exhausting me. Probably the prostaglandins going overboard.
I started watching Bon Appetit, Your Majesty in which a modern-day chef goes back in time to the Joseon era and captivates people's tastebuds, ending up in the royal kitchens. I was expecting it to be cozy but while the cooking and eating bits are cozy, the rest of it is hella stressful because the royals are all pieces of work and the male lead is a tyrant king. Our chef is in mortal danger every episode even though all she's trying to do is cook and get by peacefully until she can find her way back to 2025 😠not the ideal moontime watch, so I'm looking for something else. I do have a bunch of cozy fantasy books amassed from a couple of sales. I'm currently reading an ARC of Lidiya Foxglove's Wanted: Brooding Man, Tragic Past which releases in a couple of days and which is delightful. Not cozy but not uncozy either, and that's a middle ground I enjoy.
There's not a lot flowering yet, at the end of (for Auckland) an especially cold, wet, windy winter. I haven't felt much like gardening until the past couple of weeks and am just getting back into it now, refurbishing pots of bulbs and lilies, trying to plant snap peas (if enough of them ever sprout!)
Of course, there are other reasons why I've felt like huddling indoors, and I've been dealing with more anxiety - as I imagine, most of us have. It's sometimes hard to figure out which reality is "real" - is the cheerful busyness I feel on good days accurate, or is it denial? Is the trepidation of bad days realistic, or "through a glass darkly"? I've also considered whether my previous bout of thyroid overactivity might be coming back - I've been off the medication for it for ten months now. It can cause jitteriness, but there's more than enough cause for that without looking for medical culprits. I'll get a test when my GP arranges the form, anyway. I'm also temporarily carless - it threw up a load of warning lights and balked at starting so is at the mechanics. That might be making me feel unsettled as well.
Good things to focus on are the enjoyment of getting my hands into dirt again, watching the local sparrows mobbing the bird feeder when I fill it with seeds, a big rice-cooker of bean, veggie, kumara & chilli stew which has taken care of several days of meals, and some excellent books I've been reading and will review soon.
Have a few garden pics, meanwhile.
Return of the giant Mexican sunflower! (by my Dalek compost bin)
White primula in the agapanthus leaves
Fairy crassula in a hanging basket
Tub of succulents
Impatiens at the base of a leafless Japanese maple
Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).
Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".
Forgot to post a “view from a hotel window” view today, but this interesting contraption was right down the street from me, so I thought you might like it instead. Tonight’s event was lovely and tomorrow I will be in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore at 7pm. You should come by and say hello to me there.
I finished making the corncob broth. \o/ It tastes delicious -- delicate, slightly sweet, summery, sunny, with notes of corn and grass. This is sooo much better than regular vegetable broth! If you dislike vegetable broth, this is well worth a try. I now regret every corncob that I tossed straight onto the compost pile. Also I'm annoyed that I only discovered this at the end of the season.
I started with this recipe for inspiration. This time I used the 6 corncobs that I had, some dried onion chips, about 1/4 teaspoon white peppercorns, and three large sprigs of flat-leaf parsley.
Anyhow, I filled a tray of large ice cubes because I want to try this in stir-fry sauce to add volume. I got three cartons that are about 1 1/2 cup each, plus a big one that is probably about 4 cups and suited for crockpot use. I expect it will work anywhere I would normally use regular vegetable broth, possibly also chicken broth.
Next time I make this, and there will be a next time, I will make it in a large crockpot as usual. I'll use a quartered onion, and I might throw in something else. I suspect that lemongrass would work great, and celery or celery leaves might. Broths are flexible; you can toss in whatever you have or like. With a large crockpot I can get a great deal of broth with minimal effort.
Hemlock & Silver: Tried another book by T. Kingfisher. I liked it! The narrator is a poisons expert, who gets hired to find out if/how someone is making the king’s daughter sick. She’s very good at her job, thinking through all kinds of possibilities, and doing methodical tests — which serves her well when things start to get Weird and Magic.
There are a couple of frustrating times when she doesn’t figure something out (not even “this is a possibility I should investigate”) until a couple chapters after the reader has. Other than that, it’s really solid. I can only imagine how much background research on different toxins and venoms went into the writing. Sometimes this world has different names for things, or there’s a gap in their scientific knowledge, but you can deduce what’s going on from the practical description of causes and symptoms.
Also, it’s more Fantasy California than Fantasy Europe! Still a pretty traditional fairytale kingdom, but the plants and animals are all desert-dwellers, and there’s some Spanish influence going on.
The narrator, like the one from The House on the Cerulean Sea, is overweight, and it comes up periodically. I like the handling here so much better. She just reflects on it when she’s feeling self-conscious, or when it’s a meaningful factor in the action (e.g. if she’s incapacitated and needs to be carried somewhere). There’s no “pack of plucky orphans who regularly tease her for it without ever learning a Valuable Lesson that they’re being rude.”
It’s blurbed as “a re-imagining of Snow White,” but it only has a couple general tropes in common (mirrors, poison apples, a villain who’s a queen), not used in the same way. If the poison didn’t involve apples, and the princess wasn’t named Snow, I’m not even sure the connection would be obvious.
—
After getting my ebook purchases unlocked with Libation, I figured it was a good opportunity for some Murderbot re-listens. Specifically, I listened to Network Effect (the first novel) and System Collapse (the much-shorter second novel) back-to-back. Since that’s how the in-universe events happen, even though the book releases were years apart.
Spoilers follow! (I’ve kept some of it vague, but not everything.)
Network Effect is still really good! “Murderbot gets stuck in a survival quest with a teenager” is an inspired character setup. MB having a breakdown when it thinks it’s lost ART, then a different kind of breakdown when ART is back but now MB knows what it did, is all excellent, hits just the right hurt/comfort notes. Everything about ART meeting some of MB’s humans for the first time is great.
The excerpts from helpme.file are still a wonderful buildup, even once you already know the impending reveal of who’s reading them, and why. The sudden switch to a new POV, for the first time in the series, also stays fun even after you’re expecting it. The rescue sequences are wonderful, and the end is very well-earned.
System Collapse is…a weird one.
Some good things: The repeated references to [redacted] are good at building suspense, and the eventual reveal of the events MB is redacting is very satisfying. (And believable!) The way MB and company win over the residents of Mystery Colony is admittedly a little cheesy, but in a way I think the series has earned by this point. The interaction with enemy SecUnits toward the end has a development that’s been a long time coming.
On to the weird things:
It’s only half the length of Network Effect. On a re-listen, the pacing gives me the distinct impression that Martha Wells meant to write something the same length as Network Effect, and then started to run out of steam and wished she was doing another novella instead. Before the team gets to the Mystery Colony, the scenes have a lot of detail and attention — MB will do things like “recount its growing worry and frustration with every step in the process of trying to find a hidden hatch.” Once they enter Mystery Colony, events start whipping by. There’s more summarizing. More jumping straight from “we decided to do X” to “X was done”, without anything about the process or the challenges of getting there.
I kept wondering whether this would flow better if the premise was “MB set off adventuring with ART’s crew, and this is their first mission on a new planet,” rather than “MB and ART suddenly get a secret new mission on the planet they were already at.”
It’s probably better for MB’s mental health that [redacted] happened while a bunch of its Preservation humans were still around, because it doesn’t trust any of ART’s humans enough to seek emotional support from them. And [redacted] would give ART’s crew a skewed almost-first-impression, while the PresAux crew has a more-informed perspective, having seen MB in action across a whole bunch of different missions in the past.
On the flip side, a lot of ART’s crew are still really thin as characters, and I would’ve liked to see a mission with all of them to build them up more. The PresAux characters who had big roles in Network Effect got a lot of good development there…and I’m not sure any of that was enhanced by what they did in System Collapse? It didn’t do much for ART’s humans either, even the ones who had big roles. Might have been better if it was the whole group, so we could see their existing personal dynamics and practiced teamwork.
Ratthi/Tarik only happens if Ratthi is still around, but on a re-listen, I’m not feeling much satisfaction about that either. It’s not that I’m mad about it, it doesn’t actively drag down any characters the way Ratthi’s TV-series romance did, it’s just…so barely-there. MB’s narration covers one (1) conversation that involves them being together. I assume it’s not the first sex-related conversation MB has witnessed over the course of these books, it’s just redacting/ignoring/deleting them as not relevant to its job. But this one didn’t end up being relevant either!
At some point, I expected that Ratthi saying “SecUnit, you don’t want to hear about this, it’s a sexual conversation” was a cover story. That at some point we’d get a reveal — Ratthi was talking about something he didn’t want MB to know, and he’s figured out that “we’re talking about sex” is the surest way to get MB not to surveil something. But nope. It just doesn’t come back at all.
So, yeah. It’s not a bad book (if it was, I wouldn’t have listened to it twice!), it’s just the one entry in the MB series where I keep noticing all the ways it could’ve been better.
—
Nona the Ninth is, like all the Locked Tomb books, a lot easier to follow when you know who everyone is.
I’m not letting myself write a whole essay on this one! Just to say, it’s funny, it’s dramatic, it’s heartwarming, it’s twisty, it’s weird (on purpose, and to great effect). I’m glad I re-listened. Whenever the fourth book gets an actual release date, I’ll be there with bells on. (And I fully expect to re-binge the whole series so far before I start.)
—
Picture Perfect, by Elaine Marie Alphin, is a middle-grade almost-murder-mystery I found out about from this pluralstories entry.
I feel like anything I say is going to come off like damning with faint praise, because…listen, it’s very much a middle-grade book. It’s fine! I enjoyed it for what it was. I don’t have any particular criticisms or complaints. It’s good at what it’s trying to do! And what it’s trying to do is…be a middle-grade book.
I’m glad I read it, specifically because I was interested in the narrator-with-DID angle. If that’s a topic you’re also particularly interested in, maybe give it a look. And if you’re looking for books to recommend to a tween reader in your life, this is a solid pick.
1. We were supposed to get a lot of rain, but that seems to have blown over. We did get a little rain last night (I was awake in bed to hear it, which is always lovely) and it was raining again this morning when I went out for my walk, so instead of walking around the neighborhood and getting wet (I did take an umbrella but it would still be blowing in from the sides) I walked over to the parking structure across the street and just did laps in there for about the same distance I usually walk.
2. Just one more day before the weekend!
3. We've been getting some really delicious grapes lately. They're called autumn crisp, which is not a variety I'd heard of before, but they live up to their name. Suuuuuuper crisp, which is just how I like my grapes, and a nice sweet flavor (I don't like them too sour).
This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.
Current Music:The Poppies in the Field, "The Teardrop Explodes"
Title: Experiments in Dynamic Translation Fandom: Guardian (TV) Rating: E-rated Length: 9,017 words Notes: Part of my Breakage and Repair 'verse. In which Shen Wei and I both discover kink from first principles. Much much thanks to teaotter for beta! (Riddles and conundrums are in the same ballpark, right?) Tags: Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Established Relationship, Domesticity, Soft D/s, Unplanned/Impromptu Kink, Identity Porn (literal). Summary: It’s been just over ten weeks since his and Da Qing’s return to the land of the living, and in that time, Shen Wei has not yet had occasion to don his robes of office in front of Shuzhi—or indeed, to conduct any Envoy business at all in his presence. He’s visited the SID once or twice on official matters, but only in Haixing clothes, and he’s been sure to keep his manner light and casual in the public areas. Formal liaising is for the privacy of Zhao Yunlan’s office.
Now, faced with the prospect of a Dixing state dinner, Shen Wei discovers he’s slipped into—not so much keeping secrets as compartmentalising. Again.
So after throwing up at 1 AM as I was getting ready for bed I made a choice to not continue at the moment on this med. My heart burn is so bad and the nausea rampant that there was no way to keep on to 'see if I adjust'. It took until 10 tonight to not be nauseated but my stomach hurts so badly that I was honestly weighing going to the ER to be sure it's not a bleeding ulcer. I chose not to because a) I doubt they'd do anything other than to say see a GI doc (like 4 months from now) b) ( cut for tmi ) I still might go to urgent care if this pain and heart burn continue. I am worried that the med made my stomach issues worse.
Saw the allergist today. No one took my blood pressure. I should have asked them to but I was still SO sick at that point (he saw it immediately) I'm still light headed (another reasons to fear a bleed but as I said, there aren't signs of one so I'm not hitting the panic button yet). Got my allergy pills redone.
Went to get meds in Jackson, wanted to do the Jackson Apple fest. went to the library to see the quilt part of it and...they didn't do it this year. Aw. Then realized the building they usually do the craft vendors in is being torn down and I didn't know where they'd be now and also realized I was way too light headed to walk blocks to this so I came home. Sigh.
Have some community recs
therealljidol What would you get if you took a writing competition added the twists and turns of reality television and put it on a rollercoaster with iffy brakes? You'd get LJ Idol: "A microcosm of everything Livejournal". this is on their DW profile page...
The highlight of the day was sending out a pair of novel queries, the first in a while. Beyond that, not much. I got the flu and TDAP boosters yesterday, so my arm's sore enough I didn't want to move it a whole lot, certainly not for weightlifting, so all it was in the gym was the treadmill.
I also found out why I hadn't been informed of certain family developments: they're all on the family group chat. However, everyone else is using the iPhone's proprietary message system. Last week I turned that off to just get text messages, thinking that might help with coordinating movie theater seats - if an iPhone message wouldn't get sent, maybe a text would. Then the other people arrived and I didn't think about it for several days, until my dad gave me a call the other day about recent ongoing developments. I tried turning that feature back on, but it didn't bring in the backlog of things that'd been shared, so I'm still at a loss for how things are going. I'm also really tempted to turn it back off, just to see what happens. Except given how my phone's already largely incapable of getting internet-based message services, there's not much of a difference to be made.
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